[DISCLAIMER: it does feel terribly self-indulgent for me to post about all of my rounds like I do in this thread. I remain under the impression that some of you are interested in these posts, though, so I'll continue - although I'm happy to stop if others feel otherwise!]
I had a very incident-packed tournament round this morning at Dunbar in perfect golfing conditions. In the first five holes I made three 10-footers and a 6-footer to get to -2, and on the 6th I left a 30-footer for birdie two inches short, right in the jaws - needless to say, my putter was white-hot. I bogeyed the 7th and parred the 8th, and then as I was climbing the hill in front of the 9th tee, the battery on my electric trolley conked out. When I got home, I discovered that the battery charger wasn't properly connected to the socket in my living room, so although I'd thought it had been charging over the past two days, it hadn't. So I had to push my quite heavy trolley around the rest of the course...and worse, my trolley actually has built-in GPS to measure distance to the front/middle/back of each green, and so suddenly I didn't have my yardages available to me. Luckily I had previously downloaded a golf GPS app to my phone, but trying to figure out how to use it while pushing my trolley and not hold up the rest of my group was a complication I could do without.
Still, I turned in one-under, and although I bogeyed the 10th, I managed to par the next six holes and stood on the 17th tee still at even par. The 17th at Dunbar is a short par 4 which shares a wide fairway with the 6th hole on the left, and with the beach and ocean way to the right. Standing on the tee I saw that the flag was on the left side of the green, and I was in attack mode, so instead of aiming at the bunkers between the two fairways (which I could easily carry today) like I often do to be safe, I aimed down the right center of my fairway to get a better angle on the appproach - I'd driven the ball beautifully on the back nine, so why not? Of course, I promptly block-sliced my tee shot a good 30 yards right of my aiming point and into heavy grass between the beach and the hazard/penalty area markers, couldn't find the ball, had to go almost back to the tee for my third shot after a drop and half-topped an iron only 100 yards up the fairway, pushed my fourth to the right of the green, chipped poorly and then had my 8-footer for double unluckily kept out of the hole by the flagstick. And the worst thing is, when I got up to the fairway I realized that back on the tee I'd been looking at the yellow flag on the 5th green, not the white flag on the back-right of the 17th green - I should have aimed down the left all along! The whole thing felt like an out-of-body experience, and although I played the 18th better, I pushed my 4-footer for par and finished with an utterly maddening 75 (+4). This one is going to hurt for a while; at least I didn't do this during my club championship qualifying round in two weeks, but that's the only way it could have felt worse.