Town Rankings / Massachusetts

The Best Golf Courses in Oak Bluffs

Oak Bluffs runs on summer. The ferry docks, the gingerbread cottages fill up, the carousel spins, and for about ten weeks the town is one of the happiest crowded places in New England. Its golf, though, lives slightly outside that frame. The best course attached to this town sits out on the water at Farm Neck, and the second course on the list is technically guarded by the next town over, which Oak Bluffs golfers have treated as a technicality for about a century. Two courses, both worth your ferry fare. That is the whole bench for this corner of Martha's Vineyard, and we will rank what exists rather than pretend otherwise.

What Vineyard golf is, at its best, is wind and firm ground and rounds that end with salt still on your skin. There is no resort corridor here, no fleet of carts with coolers of branded water. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and access on the Vineyard has its own logic: one course here will happily take your money, and the other mostly will not.

1Farm Neck Golf Club

Farm Neck is the semi private course where Presidents Clinton and Obama played their summer rounds, and the presidential history, fun as it is, undersells the place. Celebrity tee times can make a course famous for the wrong reason, a backdrop with flagsticks. Farm Neck earns its reputation on the ground: a course laid out on a neck of land reaching into the water, so the round keeps meeting the shore, the wind keeps changing its mind, and the holes by the water give you the views the ferries have been selling all morning.

Semi private is the key term for the visiting golfer. Farm Neck operates as a club, with members who rightly get the best of the tee sheet, but it opens a portion of its times to the public. That makes it the only top tier Vineyard golf a traveler can plan a trip around. Book early, pay the summer rate without complaining (island golf has island costs, and the ferry ride should have prepared you), and you get a full, serious, seaside round.

The concession is pace and price at peak season. In August, Farm Neck is one of the most in demand tee times in Massachusetts, rounds slow down, and the bill lands where popular island golf always lands. The golf still clears the bar. A course that can host presidential vacations and a Tuesday regular's match with equal ease is doing the semi private balancing act better than almost anyone.

2Edgartown Golf Club

Edgartown Golf Club is a nine hole course from 1926 that its members guard closely, and the guarding is part of the point. This is old Vineyard golf, small and private and deliberately unchanged in spirit, the kind of place where the membership would rather keep the course exactly as it is than chase the Farm Neck model of public access and summer crowds.

As a test, nine holes from 1926 will not stretch a modern player, and we will not pretend the golf here outweighs eighteen seaside holes up the road. Where Edgartown wins is texture: a short, walkable, members' nine where everyone knows everyone, where the round takes the time a round used to take, and where the whole enterprise feels closer to 1926 than to the modern golf industry.

Its place on this list comes with an asterisk we are happy to print. Almost nobody reading this will play it. Membership is the only real door, and the club seems content to keep it that way, which is its right. It ranks second because the ranking is about Oak Bluffs area golf as it exists, and as it exists, this little nine is the second best course in the orbit of the town. For the traveler, the practical list is Farm Neck, twice, at different hours.

That is not a bad outcome. Play Farm Neck early, when the water is flat and the neck is quiet, then walk Oak Bluffs in the evening with the carousel lit up, and try to name a better golf day in Massachusetts in July. It takes a while.