# The Best Golf Courses in Beaufort

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-beaufort-sc/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / South Carolina


A leading golf course in South Carolina. Photo: N75746, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Beaufort itself is all porches and live oaks and tidal water, but its golf lives offshore. You drive out across the marsh, island to island, and the landscape flattens into cordgrass and creek and sky. Two of the three courses on this list sit on Fripp Island. The third waits on Dataw. Getting there is half the experience, and the drive sets the terms: this is Lowcountry golf, where the hazards glitter and move with the tide.

That geography shapes the ranking. Beaufort is not a town with a muni and a private club arguing on the same street. It is a gateway. The golf is resort and island golf, reached by causeway, played in salt air, and judged on how honestly each course uses the marsh in front of it instead of just photographing well beside it. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and on Fripp that argument comes down to two courses with very different ideas about what an island round should be.

## 1Fripp Island Ocean Point Golf Links

Ocean Point takes the top spot because it does the thing island golf promises and so often fakes: it gets you to the ocean. The round works its way out to the water and the closing stretch plays with the Atlantic in front of you, not in a brochure. On a barrier island, that finish is not decoration. Wind off the water changes club selection, changes trajectory, changes your nerve standing over the last few shots of the day.

The concession is that Ocean Point is the older style of resort test, and golfers raised on modern championship yardage may find parts of it modest. The course asks for positioning and patience more than power, and a long hitter having a good day can feel underchallenged in the calm. Wait for the breeze. Fripp usually provides one.

As the headline course of the Beaufort trip, though, it earns the position. If you cross two islands of marsh to play golf, the course at the end of the drive should put the ocean in play. Ocean Point does.

## 2Fripp Island Ocean Creek Golf Course

Ocean Creek carries the best design story on this list. It was Davis Love III's first design, and a first design by a player of Love's feel for the Lowcountry was always going to be interesting. Where Ocean Point goes out to the beach, Ocean Creek turns inward, through marsh and oak and creek edges, building its holes around the tidal landscape rather than the shoreline. It is the moodier of the two Fripp courses, and on a still morning with the marsh smoking a little, it might be the prettier walk.

Love's playing instincts show in the broad strokes: a course meant to be played, not survived, with room to miss and decisions to make when you have missed. That playability is also the concession. Golfers who want their resort golf to bite will find Ocean Creek the gentler test of the two, and gentle tests slide down rankings even when they are well made.

It slides only to second, and plenty of repeat Fripp visitors quietly prefer it. Play both and the argument is the best part of dinner. Our card gives Ocean Point the finish and Ocean Creek the design pedigree, and the finish wins by a nose.

## 3Dataw Island Club

Dataw Island Club is the private island entry, a members' club reached across the marsh on its own island, and it plays a different role in Beaufort golf from the Fripp pair. This is residents' golf: a club at the center of an island community, where the courses serve the people who live around them and the standard is set by golfers who play the same holes in every wind and season.

The concession, for the visitor, is access. A private club on a gated island is not a tee time you book on a whim, and a Beaufort trip planned around Dataw without a member connection is a trip planned around a locked gate. That costs it in any ranking that counts the day and the access alongside the architecture, however pleasant the golf inside the gate may be.

It finishes third here on reachability, not on charm. Beaufort's golf, in the end, belongs to whoever makes the drive across the marsh, and the marsh, flat and gold and indifferent to your handicap, is the round you remember.

**Reader responses are open.** Please cite a specific hole, a price, or a round you have played.