I've been pretty lucky this past summer that @mrsbozz has been indulging my affinity for disc golf. It's not that she minded me playing before, that's definitely not the case, but this summer she has been gracious enough to come along with me on more than one occasion.
Sometimes she plays a whole or part of the round and other times she simply walks with me or carries my disc golf bag while she listens to one of her audio books or something like that. On our recent weekend camping trips we have tried to play a round early in the morning and then go do something else before settling back at our campsite for the afternoon.
That was the case with Dewey Durant park in Tawas Michigan.
The course is fairly well kept up and it is spread across the entire property of the course. In fact, there are a couple of spots where the course crosses some quite public areas. I didn't get any photos for reasons that will become obvious to you in a second, but on the day we played there was some kind of kids camp happening.
That meant there were kids all over and they were holding events and activities right in the middle of the fairway on some of the holes. I ended up having to skip those holes and just taking par for them even though I might have been able to birdie them.
Most of the holes on the course are relatively short compared to some other courses I have played. The majority of them clock in at around 200 feet or less with just three of them breaking over 300 feet. There is even a hole that is a short 73 feet, but you have to throw over water, so it gets a bit dicey.
The course also runs along the property of the water treatment plant with several nasty looking water hazards on the boundary of some of the holes.
Although the water was quite nasty, there was still a bit of beauty to be found here and there. These little red flowers were all over the place and I thought they were a really stark contrast to the mostly green background that I was seeing. I even did my best to get a closer shot without falling into the algae infested ditch!
There you go, a little closer, but still not as close as I would have liked. As you can see though, the water is literally right there, so one more step and I probably would have had a radioactive foot or something like that.
It makes me wonder how many folks have lost discs in the waters here and just said "screw it" because they don't want to deal with the nasty water. Even if you were able to fish it out, you'd probably want to thoroughly disinfect it before you used it again anyway.
As I said though, there were some really nice wooded areas of the course that I found quite enjoyable to play. As you can see from the photo above, the basket in the middle is quite well guarded by a stand of pine trees. They were virtually blocking out the morning sun as I was playing my round.
I had to watch my step a bit with all of the pinecones on the ground. I should have picked some of them up and used them for kindling laterin the day to get our fire started. If you have never thrown pinecones in a fire, it's a pretty fun experience to watch. They have to be good and dry though. The material along with the pitch that many of them have makes them go up in seconds. They burn hot and fast. Perfect for getting a fresh fire going.
This is another example of just how nasty the water was in the areas around the course. It turns out at the end of the course there was a much larger pond that didn't have quite as much algae or nastiness in it. I did end up losing a disc in that body of water. It was a stupid throw and it shouldn't have happened.
Given the fact that the disc had been given to me, I didn't feel too bad about losing it. It still has the old guys name and number on it, so he will potentially be getting an unexpected call or text one day when someone finally fishes it out of the pond.
I ended up finishing the course at 1 over par which I think isn't too bad. Par for the course was 54 and I got three birdies, two bogies and one double bogey. It honestly could have been a lot worse I guess. Of course a couple of those holes you have to take with a grain of salt because I wasn't able to actually play them.
We finished the round in about 58 minutes which honestly isn't too bad at all!
From Dewey Durant park, we headed off to another state park that had much cleaner water, but you are going to have to wait until Wednesday to read about that!
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