Despite fears that Bermuda's golf courses would be completely devastated by the extreme winds of Hurricane Fabian, the majority of clubs yesterday reported very little damage to the courses themselves other than the anticipated uprooting of a large number of trees, both great and small.

Worst hit of all appears to have been the Mid Ocean Club, which bore the full force of the violent winds from the south-west at the start of the storm.

Although the highly exposed third green and fourth tee were not swept into the water as many feared, according to course superintendent Norman Furtado, the course lost close to 200 trees while the clubhouse itself, perhaps the most exposed of all on the Island, was heavily damaged.

"It looks like somebody dropped a bomb down here which blew everything to pieces," he said.

"It's an absolute war-zone."

The most serious damage to the clubhouse was upstairs in the main dining room and the bar area where the two glass verandah doors were blown in as well as a large, south-facing bay window while a significant section of the roof over both locations is also missing. The club has been closed until further notice.

The recently refurbished Tucker's Point Golf Club lost a similar number of trees but General Manager Bruce Fraser was optimistic that the course could be open again in a few days.

"All our groundstaff are out there doing there thing and working extremely hard," he said.

"We lost a lot of big casuarinas but the course itself has not been that badly damaged. We are lucky here because a lot of the course was shielded from the wind. We will recover and I expect will be back in business very soon."

At Port Royal, starter Robert McRonald described the destruction as "severe", noting that it would probably take the course staff "an entire week" to remove all the debris from the fairways and that the club's driveway, right down to Munro Beach Cottages, was completely impassable.

Riddell's Bay and the Southampton Princess both survived the hurricane relatively unscathed besides the inevitable mountains of foliage on fairways and greens.