The re-developed Port Royal Golf Course has been fully open for the past month. The Royal Gazette's Josh Ball went to take a look. These are his –first impressions.

It turns out that the Premier was right all along.

Despite much doubt, Port Royal Golf Course will be ready to host the PGA Grand Slam in October, just like Dr Ewart Brown said it would.

Forget the politics, forget the doubts, forget the row over membership and course fees. Port Royal will be everything that was promised, and more.

It was touch and go for a time, the second wettest June on record certainly arrived at an opportune moment, and it will still be another month or so before the greens and fairways are completely ready, but any thoughts of a last minute switch to Mid Ocean should be dispelled for good.

Not everyone will be happy with the new course. The loss of a good number of trees has changed the characteristics, but the Casuarina trees have been replaced by indigenous Bermuda cedar and palm tress and give the course an openness it had been lacking.

Open spaces can sometimes come across as rather dull, sparse landscapes, and from a purely aesthetic point of view that might be a valid argument for this course, at least for the time being.

However opening the course up has brought the wind into play a lot more, and most of the back nine is now exposed to the elements from both sides of the Island. On a calm day however, the course is less of a challenge, something entirely in keeping with links golf, just think Tiger at St Andrews.

There will also be the usual complaint about the cost, but let's put this in perspective.

Pebble Beach Golf Links, like Port Royal, is a public course, and will host next year's US Open. It costs $495 for a round, which doesn't include a cart. The secondary course at Pebble Beach, Spyglass Hill, costs $340 a round.

St Andrews, the most famous public course of them all, charges $214 to play between April and October, and that's if you can get a tee-time.

At roughly $250 a round Port Royal sits well priced for what you get, and while it may not yet have the following, or the tradition, of either Pebble Beach or St Andrews, it will.

Port Royal's signature hole, the par-three 16th, has been lengthened from 170 yards to 235. Its back tees now sit on the edge of the cliff, and any shot into a smallish green requires the golfer to take note of the wind, which swirls around the hole from several different directions.

It is a hole that will capture the imagination of all that play it, and will soon be spoken about in the same breath as the 17th at TPC Sawgrass, the 7th and 8th at Pebble Beach, and the 9th at Turnberry.

And if the 16th is soon spoken of in reverent tones, then the 18th will be cursed for ruining even the best of rounds. It is Bermuda's own Green Monster.

Like the wall at Fenway Park, the fairway rises to the heavens, and even the longest of hitters will face a daunting uphill second shot to an elevated green they cannot see.

It gets worse though, for the new green is a three-tiered devil that slopes sharply at the front, and anyone foolish enough to drop short will find their ball racing back towards them down the steep fairway.

The openness of the course will lull the unsuspecting into a false sense of security. It maybe open, but there is devilment aplenty in the run of the fairways and greens, and now the wind whips in from both sides of the Island.

Unlike some modern courses however Port Royal has not been set up to see golfers fail, it is a fair test, and rewards those with enough intelligence and guts to know when to take it on, and when not to.

The 15th is a prime example of that. The tee box has been moved back, and a new bunker added on the right, it is the ultimate risk-reward hole. Drive the bunker and a birdie is within easy reach, miss and you'll be lucky to escape with a bogey.

Change is not always a good thing, and there are times when designers have taken a good course and ruined it through their meddling. Happily this is not one of those times.

Port Royal has been sensitively re-developed to include a number of new bunkers, new water hazards at holes one, two and 17, and lengthened to a respectable 6,842-yards.

The designers have fought off the desire to Tiger-proof the course, and even though new equipment allows players to hit the ball further, anyone who steps onto a tee and happily blasts away without thought is going to be in for a long, and painful, round.

This then is a course that has something for everyone. It will reward, and punish, the Saturday hacker and the professional alike. It will be a credit to Bermuda, and a challenge worthy of the game's best players.