By KEVIN BROOKER
The classic sounds of sport: The crack of the bat, the swish of the ball catching nothing but net, the tuk-tuk-tuk-tuk of the ball settling into the cup, the jingle of chains.
All of them may be familiar to most people except, maybe, the jingle of chains. That is unless you happen to play Disc Golf.
Depending upon who is asked, the origin story of disc golf is rather murky. Most agree the invention of the Wham-O Frisbee, patented in 1966, is where it all started. Instead of hitting a ball with a club, players began playing “Frolf” by throwing a Frisbee trying to “hole out” by hitting a predetermined pole or boulder. The idea was pretty good and 57 years later the sport has become a worldwide recreational activity.
My first few trips to the disc golf course were not much more than a good excuse to walk through the woods with my friends during the first summer of the pandemic. Outside, socially distanced, beer, friends, and plastic UFO-looking things that fly.
My wife Jill reluctantly joined us for a round (both to throw discs and a beer afterwards) and was instantly captivated by the sport. Soon, she was inviting me to go play a round.
It’s safe to say we have become disc golfers as opposed to people who play disc golf.
We also are enthusiastic aviators traveling around New England in our 1946 Taylorcraft BC12-D.
So it made sense to combine our two favorite recreational activities, flying the Taylorcraft to new disc golf courses.
That hit home when, traveling by car to play The Pinnacle Course in Newport, New Hampshire, we drove right past Parlin Field Airport (2B3).
But first we had to determine how practical is it to fly to go play disc golf. The family joke is when traveling by Taylorcraft our luggage is anything we can fit into a gallon plastic bag.
And you need much more than that to play disc golf.
Just like airplanes, each disc has unique flight characteristics best suited to a given situation. For tournaments we might each carry 15 different discs.
When flying to play, we choose the most versatile that fit into the Tcraft.
The first time we did it, we flew back to Parlin. The FBO has bicycles available and we rode the one mile to the Pinnacle course.
Flying to play disc golf was fun and practical.
The next problem was locating courses within walking distance to an airport.
Although we both play as amateurs, Jill and I are members of the Professional Disc Golf Association, which is the worldwide governing body of the sport.
An email to the member services department asking if they had the latitude and longitude for courses was replied with a spreadsheet listing over 4,000 places to play.
Determining the relationship to airports was next.
The solution came when I volunteered to overfly and photograph parcels of land held in conservation by the Upper Valley Land Trust. Jason, the VP of stewardship, sent me .klm shape files for upload into ForeFlight so we can find each plot of land from the air.
Until this, the idea of uploading waypoint files into the flight planning software hadn’t occurred to me.
A bit of data massaging, renaming, and format changes allowed the courses to become waypoints in ForeFlight. The data reduction for New England and points within a two-hour Tcraft flight was complete. Finding places to fly into for a round of disc golf was only a matter of a screen refresh.
With courses identified on the sectional chart, the next step was using the disc golf phone app, UDisc, to check on conditions, hours of operation, etc. Creating a list of where to play was pretty simple and we began living like rock stars and flew in order to play.
Just like many airports, disc golf courses can be remote, limiting the availability of “for hire” ground transportation. We defined “walking distance” as anything within two miles, which takes about 40 minutes each way.
A round can take anywhere between two and three hours. Most FBOs with crew cars don’t want them taken for the time it takes to throw a round.
A call to the FBO asking about ground transport is a good idea and has saved a lot of walking.
Parlin has become the default intro flight for our disc golf friends. Twenty-five minutes by Tcraft, short bike ride, and a very fun course to play.
Then in the spring and summer of 2023, we made trips to a dozen courses and two really stand out.
Maple Hill DGC is the number one rated course in the world located right off the end of Runway 29 at Worcester Regional Airport (KORH) in central Massachusetts.
From my home base at Post Mills Airport (2B9) in Vermont, the flight to Worcester takes about an hour and 20 minutes. After landing, my eyes bugged out when we turned off the taxiway towards to the FBO and saw jetways poking out the side of a building.
After parking and a six-minute Uber ride, we had a great time chucking discs through the woods at Maple Hill.
After contacting ground control and obtaining permission to taxi to the departure end of 29, a JetBlue flight made the next call, immediately followed by the Delta crew looking for taxi clearance. It was pretty fun taxiing by the nose of two airliners (we could have taxied beneath them) who were told to follow the yellow Taylorcraft and give it room. The airline crews and a few passengers waved as we rolled past.
Auburn/Lewiston Municipal (KLEW) in Maine has three courses within a short ride of the FBO.
During the ride back to the airport, we struck up a conversation with Kathy, the Uber driver, and mentioned we had flown to Lewiston in a small airplane. She asked to see our ride, signed herself out as “OFF DUTY,” and we escorted her to the transient parking ramp. She sat in the cockpit, asked a ton of questions, and even offered to help push the airplane to the fuel pumps.
I offered her a ride and she politely declined. The stop to see the airplane was making her late for dinner.
