Pelican Golf Club reopens

NEWPORT BEACH — Jeffrey Adkins and Jim Allen can’t stay too long at the Pelican Hill Golf Club this week.

After all, they have 55 more clubs to go.

The longtime friends, who were among the first to arrive at Pelican Hill when it reopened Friday morning, belong to a group of 15 golfers competing to be the first to play at the top 100 ranked courses from Golf Digest.

Pelican Hill marked the 45th course Adkins and Allen had covered, and they planned to return the following week for more rounds — before hopping on a plane to Florida to notch four courses there.

“My goal is, in two years, to have them done,” Allen, an Anaheim resident, said Friday at the Pelican Hill driving range en route to the first hole.

For Allen, at least, the trip to Newport Coast was a short one.

Adkins ventured down from Sacramento to join his friend on the green, although that was no wonder — on the website for the top-100 competition, www.golfestonline.com, he listed Pelican Hill as his favorite course, the one with the best service and the one with the best food.

The revamped Pelican Hill Golf Club, which represents the first phase of the Irvine Co.’s massive Resort at Pelican Hill, opened its doors shortly after dawn Friday.

Around two dozen golfers made the journey down East Coast Highway to tee off and visit the brand-new clubhouse and Pelican Grill restaurant.

Officials plan to open the rest of the resort, including a spa, a wedding chapel and hundreds of villas and bungalows, next fall.

Steve Friedlander, the golf club’s general manager, said golfers had begun making reservations for the first day since late September.

The two courses were booked through the weekend, he said, but vacancies still came up if a member dropped out of a foursome.

“If someone shows up, we’ll get them out there,” Friedlander said. “‘Full’ is a relative term.”

As the first golfers hit the driving range, 160 new golf carts lined the pavement by the grass, each one equipped with a laser device that measures a player’s distance from the nearest flag stick.

The courses mostly resembled themselves from two years ago, but world-renowned designer Tom Fazio had amended some of the holes and added new turf, bunkers and irrigation.

Many of the golfers in attendance Friday had played regularly at Pelican Hill before it closed.

One of them, a Huntington Beach man, said he and his friends had visited the course its last day in 2005, and made it a point to return the day of the reopening.

The golfer declined, however, to reveal his name.

“I kind of lied to my boss about where I am this morning,” he said.

MICHAEL MILLER may be reached at (714) 966-4617 or at michael.miller@latimes.com.