G.T. Bray Park in Manatee County, Bradenton, Florida is 30mins drive from our home and this is where we pick up my blog following our time away travelling, with no disc golf involved. It's a large recreational park with many amenities including a Disc Golf Course.
It's the end of January 2020 and we decided to start the new year and our disc golf again with a different course and G.T. Bray Disc Golf Course was an easy one to find and a very different challenge.
The recreational park has 2 entrances and the best way to find the Disc Golf Course is to take the entrance off 51st St W, near the dog park and then follow the road/trail round to the left to park up near a pavilion close to the 18th basket. There is ample parking.
The course is free to play and at the time of writing there was no Course board so use the phone app UDisc. There are toilets (restrooms) available and water fountains as well as benches and tables in pavilion areas.
This is an 18 hole course with one tee off point per hole. Par 54 and 5196ft. Rubber mat tees. It's a mainly wooded course with not too much under canopy scrub to cause problems. This is a public park and therefore you can get people walking along the paths near some of the holes. Some changes to the layout has decreased the cross over of walkers and players but there are some people who do walk through the woodland, off the paths, so be mindful when throwing discs.
When you've started to learn to throw on a fairway thats open and lined with a few trees and small shrubs/grasses this looks daunting. However, I absolutely loved it. Hitting trees, didn't matter. Going in the wrong direction, didn't matter. The environment was great to play in. I've always loved woodlands since I was small. Climbing trees and playing hide and seek. To be able to play a sport in this kind of place was amazing. Starting again after 6 weeks away meant virtually starting from scratch, but this gave us a new challenge and trying to get round trees was fun, if not frustrating, as we still didn't have the skills to shape shots.
We played here a few times before meeting any other Disc Golfers. Going early morning before it got too warm. When we did meet up with a group of 6 guys they were so friendly and happy to see 2 women playing that we must have spent at least half an hour chatting about how we got started, did we like their course, what discs were we throwing etc etc. It was so good to chat with others face to face about the sport. One of the guys even gave my partner as disc, an Innova Champion Plastic Starfire. He couldn't get on with it and as it turned out neither could either of us. It was too heavy and too advanced for us at this stage. I think he'd been given it by someone else. However, it was a really kind gesture. We did meet up with that same guy again a couple of weeks later and he played a few holes with us. He liked to play forehand and showed me a different grip which applied better power through my fingers. I've continued to use that same grip.
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