Town Rankings / Florida
The Best Golf Courses in Fernandina Beach
Amelia Island runs on two economies that share one thirteen mile island. At the south end, the resorts: the Omni, the Ritz-Carlton, the gates and the green fees to match. At the north end, Fernandina Beach itself, a working shrimp port town with a Victorian main street, where the city runs a 27 hole municipal course five minutes from the beach and charges municipal prices for it. The island's golf map is a map of that divide, and this ranking covers all of it, town and resorts together, because the island is too small to pretend they are separate scenes.
Five courses make the bench, deep for a town this size: a Pete Dye on the marsh, two resort courses with designers' names on the card, a river course the public can book, and the old muni that has anchored Nassau County golf since 1948. We score the golf first, then the day, then access and value.
1Omni Amelia Island Oak Marsh
Oak Marsh is the splurge and the summit: a Pete Dye design from the mid 1970s, built through salt marsh and live oak hammock on the island's south end, in the years when Dye was inventing the modern vocabulary of target golf. The marsh is not scenery here. It is the hazard, the strategy, and the view all at once, and the course plays low and tight through it, demanding placement over power in a way that still flusters golfers raised on resort width. Dye in this era built courses to examine a player, and Oak Marsh examines.
The concessions are resort economics and resort traffic: premium Amelia Island pricing, a tee sheet shared with every convention at the Omni, and a design that can turn a casual vacation round into a long education. Golfers who want their Dye gentle should look elsewhere on this list. But the best architecture on Amelia Island is not a close call, and the marsh setting is the island's true landscape, not the manicured version. No. 1, comfortably.
2Golf Club of Amelia Island
The Golf Club of Amelia Island, designed by Mark McCumber and Gene Littler and opened in 1991 beside the Ritz-Carlton, is the second resort course and the most conventionally pleasurable round on the island. McCumber is a Northeast Florida player who became a designer in his home region, and the course reflects a player's sense of what a round should feel like: marsh, oaks, and dunes worked into a layout that challenges without prosecuting. It is the round resort guests retake, the one they book again for Thursday.
It finishes second because Oak Marsh is a Dye and this is not, and the gap in design ambition shows on the holes that matter most. Against that, the Golf Club wins the day more often than it loses it: better tempered, more forgiving of the once a year swing, and played in a prettier resort frame.
3Amelia River Golf Club
Amelia River is the public's resort course, the one a golfer without a room key or a membership can book and still feel he got the island's real thing. It plays the river side of Amelia, through oaks and along the Intracoastal marsh country that the beach courses trade for sand, and the golf is a step above the daily fee norm for the region: a full length test with water in regular attendance and a local following that treats it as the town's serious public option.
Third place reflects the company. Amelia River lacks a name architect's signature holes and a resort's conditioning budget, and it concedes both to the two courses above it. What it keeps is access without apology, the only course in the top half of this list that a schoolteacher from Fernandina can play on a Saturday without planning his month around it.
4Omni Amelia Island Ocean Links
Ocean Links was Bobby Weed's contribution to the Omni property, a course built for the ocean holes, the stretch where the golf ran along the Atlantic and the whole resort sold itself on that postcard. Weed, who also figures in the Oak Marsh story, understood drama, and the ocean stretch here was the most photographed golf on the island.
It ranks fourth with an asterisk the size of the Atlantic. The resort has reconfigured this ground over the years, so treat Ocean Links as a ranking of the golf as it was designed and celebrated, and confirm what is actually open before building a trip around it. On memory and reputation the ocean holes outrank everything below them here. On present day certainty, it gives back ground to courses you can definitely play.
5Fernandina Beach Golf Club
The town course is a 27 hole municipal facility dating to 1948, among the oldest golf on Amelia Island, flat coastal golf through pines and oaks with three nines that let the leagues, the juniors, the retirees, and the visitors all find a game. This is where Fernandina actually plays. The conditioning follows a city budget, the architecture makes no speeches, and the parking lot on a Saturday morning tells you more about the health of golf on this island than any resort ranking could.
It finishes fifth on the golf and first on the town, and the ranking is content with that split. A muni that has served the same community since 1948, five minutes from the beach, at prices a deckhand can pay, is not the bottom of a list. It is the foundation the rest of the list stands on.
The shrimp boats work the river at first light while the first groups tee off through the pines across town, and down at the south end the marsh at Oak Marsh turns the color of weak tea in the morning sun. One island, two golfs, and the rare place where both of them are worth the drive.