# The Best Golf Courses in Rockport

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-rockport-me/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Maine


A golf course in autumn foliage. Photo: Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Some courses get one photograph. Samoset gets two, and they are both honest: the 4th and the 18th, running along Penobscot Bay by the Rockland breakwater, where the course meets the water and the round stops being about your score for a moment. Rockport is a small harbor town on Maine's midcoast, all working waterfront and white houses, and its golf lives at the Samoset Resort, a hotel site that dates to 1889, with resort golf on the ground since 1974.

That is the top of this ranking and there is no suspense about it. The rest of the list is one local club, and the honest framing is this: Rockport is a one destination course town with a genuine local alternative, not a deep bench. Two courses, both worth your time for completely different reasons, and a bay that does the heavy lifting for both of their settings.

## 1Samoset Resort Golf Course

Samoset's argument is written on the scorecard before you play a shot: the 4th and the 18th run Penobscot Bay at the Rockland breakwater. Oceanside holes are the currency of Maine golf, and Samoset holds two of the strongest in the midcoast, a par sequence early that introduces the water and a finisher that brings you home along it. Resort courses often promise coastal golf and deliver one glimpse of the sea from a back tee. Samoset puts you on the bay, twice, including at the end when the round is being decided.

The history underneath it deepens the case. A hotel has stood on this site since 1889, which means this ground has been hosting summer visitors since the age of steamships and verandas, and the resort golf laid over it since 1974 has had fifty years to settle into the property. It feels established rather than installed, a course that grew into a classic Maine resort instead of being dropped onto one.

The concession: it is resort golf, with everything that implies. Peak season brings resort pace, resort crowds and a tee sheet full of golfers playing their one round of the year. The inland holes cannot match the bay holes, and the contrast is noticeable, a round with two peaks and a middle that works to connect them. None of that changes the ranking. If you are on the midcoast with one day for golf, this is the day, and the 18th along the breakwater is why.

## 2Rockland Golf Club

Rockland Golf Club, in the neighboring working city that gives the breakwater its name, is the local answer: the members' and residents' golf of this stretch of coast, played by people who measure a course in decades of rounds rather than one vacation day. Where Samoset is a destination, Rockland is a habit.

Second place is the natural result of comparing a local club to a bay side resort course with two signature holes. Rockland gives up the water, the resort presentation and the postcard. What it keeps is authenticity of a different kind, the midcoast as it lives the rest of the year, when the summer people have gone and the golf belongs to the people who shovel snow off these fairways in their minds all winter.

Concede the obvious counterpoint and mean it: a golfer who values a quiet tee sheet, a fair price and a round that moves will have days at Rockland better than a slow peak season loop at the resort. Our rankings reward the ceiling, and Samoset's ceiling, those two holes on Penobscot Bay, sits higher than anything else in this town. But Rockland is the reason this list has a second entry worth reading rather than a courtesy mention.

Rockport, then, in one image: a resort course finishing along a breakwater into a harbor town, and a local club a few minutes away keeping the game for the people who stay. Play Samoset for the bay. Play Rockland to meet the midcoast. The water is in both rounds, one way or another.

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