Myself and a group of mates usually play a round of golf every weekend, and there’s been constant mutterings amongst us about joining a club. During the summer months, we’d mostly play at Woolooware Golf Club as it was relatively easy to get an early tee time so we’d have our round finished before the day got too hot. However, once autumn arrived and the days started getting shorter, it became much tougher to get on the course before noon, so we’d end up migrating between a few different courses depending on which one was available on a given weekend.

Over the two months we finally got our act together, looked seriously into joining a club. We weren’t interested in joining somewhere full of corporate types who were members for resume-enhancement purposes and while playing in the odd competition might be fun, it wasn’t particularly important. We were mainly interested in being able to get a good tee time on a good course, and taking the piss out of each other as we played.

Once we started looking into it, the costs associated with joining a club were relatively inexpensive. Leaving aside the one-off joining fee, if we were playing only half the weekends in a year it was more affordable to be a member than not. In the end we decided to join Eastlakes as it’s reasonably priced and a pretty down-to-earth setup. It’s a tricky course already, and they’re investing money with a view to bringing it up to championship standard, so it’s likely to challenge us for a long time to come.

Myself and Gerard went down this evening and signed up, and Simon, Clyde and Hilton are also signing up shortly so there’ll be a good group of us there. Now all I need to do is play five competition games so I can earn an official handicap, though apparently, just for initial handicap purposes, you can’t score worse than a double bogey. That might not work to well in my favour as I tend to score OK on most holes and have one or two blowouts to ruin my round. Still, there’s only one way to find out.