Why the fall season at Cabot Cape Breton is the longest on fun

Adjusting expectations is never easy, whether watching our children grow, assessing our self-worth, or planning a golf buddies’ trip. Twelve months ago, I signed up for what looked like an idyllic excursion: a golf-themed cruise in Canada’s Maritimes on a four-mast power sailboat. Operated by Expedition Experience, the 12-day “Fiddle & Sticks” voyage included ports of call in Québec’s bucolic Îles-de-la-Madeleine; Newfoundland’s outports, villages exclusively accessible by water or air; Nova Scotia and St. Pierre, a French territory (euros and passport required), with golf on world-class courses along the way. Despite my acute seasickness, I’d sailed much of this voyage before and loved it. But it was the promise of golf in Cape Breton that checked the “must-go-again” box for me.

Then came the curveball. As I queued in Toronto for my connecting flight to Nova Scotia, I received a text from my friend and traveling companion, Halifax-based Breton Murphy, alerting me that the sailing had been scrapped due to a logistical issue: our captain had unexpectedly left for Central Europe. Undeterred, and so near to playing Cabot Links and Cabot Cliffs I could taste the salty air, we swapped a keel for a car and off we sped to Cape Breton.   

Murphy, my impromptu chauffeur with Poulter-esque fashion tastes, was raised in Sydney, a historic mining town on Cape Breton’s eastern shore. He spent his youth sailing on Bras d’Or Lakes, the island’s inland sea and visiting relatives’ lakeshore cabins, escapes he continued while in college at St. Francis Xavier University. His anecdotes fueled our odyssey better than my English breakfast tea.

As a Pacific Northwesterner, I can’t approach Cabot Cape Breton without drawing comparisons to Bandon Dunes. The similarities are not coincidental. When Cabot founder Ben Cowan-Dewar was shown the headlands between Inverness and the Atlantic Ocean, he reached out to Bandon Dunes founder Mike Keiser.

Fully occupied by his fast-growing Oregon resort, Keiser passed on the investment opportunity until, that is, he visited the Nova Scotia parcel or, more specifically, the 40 parcels Cowan-Dewar had pieced together. The pair formed a partnership, with Keiser in the role of mentor rather than manager. Canadian architect Rod Whitman was hired to design Cabot Links. Like David McLay Kidd, who was plucked from obscurity to design Bandon Dunes, Whitman had never been commissioned a project of this magnitude before. Cowan-Dewar and Whitman broke ground in 2009, an inauspicious year to launch an audacious project on the eastern edge of North America. The course opened three years later.

It would be a crime to focus solely on drives and not driving here, given that Cape Breton is one of the most beautiful chunks of terrain in North America, best viewed from the Cabot Trail, a 186-mile route that courses around the island. When the fall colors set in, it’s as pretty as any place on the planet. My first visit to Cape Breton centered on hiking, paddling, and chasing moose in Cape Breton Highlands National Park. Gaelic, Acadian and Mi’kmaq cultures add still more patterns to the tartan.

The Celtic Colours International Festival, arguably the finest celebration of Celtic music and culture in the world, launches in early October when the sugar maples, birch and beech transform into an arboreal kaleidoscope. The artistic spectrum also dazzles, with more than 200 events and 50 musical performances spanning nine days.

Celtic Colours corresponds with the end-of-season rates at Cabot Cape Breton. Though October weather can be temperamental, strolling these tracks in cloud-filtered sunlight and crisp autumnal temperatures is a delight, and all the better at a discount. The Cape’s geography won’t disappoint any other time of the year either, with vast swaths of alpine forests embracing glacial lakes.  

Cape Breton was no stranger to excellent golf prior to Cowan-Dewar’s arrival. In 1939, the National Park Service hired Stanley Thompson, Canada’s dean of golf architecture, to design nine holes within the park. Thompson, insisting on an additional nine, crafted Cape Breton Highland Links, a former fixture on GOLF’s list of Top 100 Courses in the World and among the most stunning and varied 18-hole walks anywhere. 

From its parkland starting point, the routing works uphill through the pines, then down toward the coast. The par-3 3rd hole requires a carry over a baby loch; the par-5 7th ducks into the woods, cutting a narrow passage through a sylvan gorge; the 9th, a short par 4, features a blind approach, while the par-3 10th drops precipitously into a dell; the par-3 12th calls for a beastly carry along the Clyburn river. Then it’s out into the highlands and back toward the Atlantic for the closing holes. Eighty-five years on, Thompson’s Cape Breton Highland Links should be added to any Cape Breton golf junket, especially now that recent attention has improved the track’s previously scruffy complexion. 

Murphy and I had prepped for two days by playing a lesser-known but only slightly less challenging layout, The Lakes at Ben Eoin. Situated on the eastern shore of Bras d’Or Lake, these 18 meander the hillside and present several gorgeous vistas of the eponymous lake. Forest flanks every fairway. Brooks slither across favored landing areas. The par-3 17th at golden hour, framed by the lake, presents as beautiful a picture as one could paint without an ocean in the backdrop.

Which brings us to the Atlantic-framed masterpieces of Cabot Cape Breton. More than out and back nines, a sandy base, tee-to-green fescue, and other classic characteristics, I believe a links is best defined by surprise: blind shots, hidden greens, crazy contours. It’s an insult to call a course “tricked out.” But I consider “boring” to be the most slanderous descriptor for a course, a moniker that is most liable to cancel future visits, suitcase closed.

Cabot Links and Cabot Cliffs never feel mundane. True, these courses, poised above the ocean like an infinity pool, have an unfair aesthetic advantage, but it’s the dual layouts – siblings but not twins – that make me giddy.

Play the Links first, if possible, as the Whitman design doesn’t bear the Cliff’s teeth. You’ll still have to concentrate, as I failed to do on the 465-yd par-4 6th when, consumed with the indented bay waiting to drown my lefty fade, I drove my ball through the fairway and into the native juniper. Trouble also lurks in plain sight on the 620-yard 11th, a plateau and valley setup I never could quite figure out. It was the only hole on the Links where a caddie’s insights would have proved invaluable.

Ordinarily, I don’t obsess too much about wind, as my ball flight doesn’t exactly tickle the heavens. But the 108-yard, par-3 14th, with an elevated tee facing the Atlantic, nearly left me curled in a fetal position. Murphy soared the green during a break in the gusts; I aimed left of the green and watched my ball sail into a bunker on the right. Triple-bogey. I adjusted my launch angles for the final four holes, a finishing stretch that proved particularly punishing for wayward shots.

Like its counterpart, Cabot Cliffs begins benignly. The opening hole is a 581-yard par 5 with a few well-placed bunkers to hold your focus. Though Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw are known as two of the nicest people in the industry, the niceties end on the second hole, which requires a deft tee shot threatened by a brook, followed by a blind shot to an elevated green that lurks behind a shrub-stubbled hill: a pronouncement that the fun has truly begun.

The author’s playing partner on Cabot Cliff’s closing hole.

Crai S. Bower

The giggles continue. The 389-yard par-4 3rd demands the first of countless (okay, nine) carries, not including the six par 3s. (On the Cliffs, pars are parsed into thirds.) Of the nine “say your prayers and swing” tee shots, the gaping 589-yd par 5 7th, with a watery grave below and a shrub-filled cemetery to the right, induces the most frightening nightmares.

There is perhaps no more demanding task for an architect than composing a blind shot. As for the golfer, so much can go awry. It’s a fine line, after all, between a mesmerizing feature and a frustrating gimmick. Coore and Crenshaw provide a masterclass on the 15th hole, a 560-yard par 5 where, should one strike a perfect second shot with a long iron or fairway wood, the ball will streak down the right side of the fairway to the gathering green where eagles, or at least two-putt birdies, alight.

The six par-3s also play out in in a creative cadence with a couple of blind greens and plenty of room for creativity. On the 186-yard 6th, our foursome watched each tee shot disappear behind the knoll, reappear to surmount the back edge, then trundle back into the abyss before gathering, we discovered moments later, within three feet of each other about fifteen paces from the flag.

If the 6th entertained us with unseen gyrations, the 176-yard 16th befuddled our quartet from the start, the flag an apparition so far left of the green that I questioned my yardage book. Faced with a pure ocean carry over spectacular igneous spires, I was certain my five iron was a tap-in birdie were it not for the green’s unforeseen descent toward the imposing Atlantic.

Coore and Crenshaw are right back at it on the 331-yard 17th, a cliff-hugging par 4 where a well-struck drive over the bluffs to an unseen fairway can catch a speed slot and spill down to the green’s mouth, assuming it avoids several menacing bunkers.

Were both courses situated on my side of the continent, I’d hit Cabot Links when I could, but I’d play Cabot Cliffs with a headlamp if it meant accumulating more rounds.

We wrapped up at Cabot’s Whit’s Public House before making the hour drive back to Baddeck, a Bras d’Or Lake harbor village where we’d launched our day with a two-hour lobster-boat cruise and where we planned to close the evening over fresh lobster at the new Main Street Restaurant.

The next morning, while collecting a scone at the fabulous Herring Choker Deli outside of town, I purchased a hand-painted lighthouse magnet to carry home, a symbol of Cabot Cape Breton’s charms. 

The owner of Expedition Experience assures me that “Fiddle & Sticks” will be back on the books in 2026. I’m ready to rosin my clubs, grab my anti-nausea acupressure wristbands, and jig my way back across the continent to the Maritimes. 

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