Town Rankings / California

The Best Golf Courses in Half Moon Bay

Half Moon Bay sits forty minutes from downtown San Francisco and behaves like it is four hundred miles away. Fog in the morning, fishing boats in the harbor, and on the bluff south of town, two golf courses sharing one resort and one long stretch of Pacific cliff. This is a two course town, so this is a two course list. No padding, no honorary mentions. The only question worth arguing is the order.

Both courses belong to the same property and finish near the same hotel lawn, which tempts people to treat them as a package. They are not the same test. One was built to use the ocean as a hazard and a backdrop for as many holes as possible. The other is an older, gentler routing that saves its ocean moment for the end. We score the golf first, then the day, and that settles it.

1Half Moon Bay Golf Links Ocean Course

The Ocean Course is Arthur Hills' links on the bluff, and links is doing honest work in that sentence. The ground is open and exposed, the wind is a full participant, and the holes run along the cliff edge with the Pacific in view and in mind for most of the round. This is the rare California coastal course where the ocean is not a postcard behind one green. It is the weather, the trouble, and the strategy, all at once.

The concession: exposed means exposed. On a day when the wind comes hard off the water, the Ocean Course stops being a test and starts being a survival exercise, and higher handicaps will lose balls and patience in roughly equal measure. Pick your day if you can. On a clear afternoon, with the light going gold over the water, it is the finest public round on this stretch of coast and the clear top of this list.

2Half Moon Bay Golf Links Old Course

The Old Course is the elder of the pair, a parkland style routing through cypress and neighborhood streets for most of its length, saving the drama for a finish that comes home along the cliff and ends at the Ritz-Carlton's back lawn. That closing stretch is the reason people remember it: you play an inland course for three hours and then the ocean arrives all at once, like a plot twist.

Second place is about the middle. The Old Course's inland holes are pleasant and well kept, but they could belong to several good California resort courses, while the Ocean Course's holes could belong nowhere else. The honest defense of the Old is real, though. It is the kinder round, the better walk on a windy day, and for a mixed group it may be the smarter booking.

One more consideration, because it decides real bookings: the fog. Summer mornings here can start in a gray murk that burns off by the turn, and the Ocean Course in full fog is a moody, disorienting round that some golfers love and others resent paying resort prices for. The Old Course, sheltered inland for most of its holes, shrugs the fog off sooner. Locals book the Old in the morning and the Ocean in the afternoon, when the wind and the light do their best work, and visitors with two days should copy them exactly.

That is the whole bench, and it is enough. One resort, two courses, forty minutes from a major city, and a finishing hole played toward a hotel lawn with the Pacific below it. Plenty of bigger golf towns would trade their fourth and fifth courses for this town's second.