The Wind

No doubt about it, a strong wind will toughen up even the most straightforward of courses. However, there's no point in worrying about it, and certainly no need to fear it. You can see in the recorded round commentary section that I show that you can still make a lot of birdies even when the wind is howling. If I say that I expect to score 12 to 18 under in no wind, and maybe 10 to 15 under in the breeze, I would say a birdie every other hole (-9) is very attainable on most of the courses in Links, although there are a few courses when you will have to expect that a few under par is a good score.I hope to add a breezy section to this guide, but for now I'll concentrate on the wind, as this is the most demanding ( often with breezy I will just take 15 yards as the distance change either helping or in your face and I will guess the drift somewhere around 20-25 feet). It might be useful to define some of the terms I'll be using in this section, and as an added bonus I've added a big section on the physics of the wind for anyone who is interested. It's up to you how picky you want to be in the wind, but I would definitely say you are probably wasting your time trying to remember all the distances for every club, much better to remember the rough values at either end of the club range, and have a feel for the trends involved. You should also note that often the wind will flicker about as you take your shot and also any mis-snap can be grabbed by the wind and taken way off-line. For these reasons alone, it's probably not a good idea to get too wrapped up in the numbers, you're only going to be disappointed.When taking a shot in the wind, it IS a good idea just to pause a few seconds, especially if the wind meter is visibly flickering in strength and direction, generally the meter will settle after a while, so dont be afraid to hang on a few seconds and even change clubs if the wind shifts noticably before you play.

Right, the definitions. We refer to the wind direction by angle (0° - 360°) where 0° is a wind right behind you,90° is a left-to-right crosswind, 180° is a wind right in your face and 270° is a right-to-left crosswind. Thinking in terms of "times", every 30° is equal to one hour on an imaginary clock face under the wind meter, so for example 30° is 1 o'clock, and 240° would be 8 o'clock.Lets have a look at the wind meter and the standard directions.


Everyone's favourite wind, the one right at our backs helping us reach those par5's in two.This is the 0° case, or 12 o'clock, and is referred to as a TAILWIND. This usually helps us on the par5's and the long par4's and gives us a lot of short shots into the green but it can be a pain, especially on hard/fast greens where it can be difficult to stop the ball on the green.	The scary wind, right in your face, which is the 180° case, or 6 o'clock. This is called a HEADWIND.Although this makes the par5's generally unreachable in two and makes the par4 and par3's long, it can sometimes be useful as it can help balls stop quickly on the green, but you are generally coming in with a longer club which is less accurate than with the short irons	This is the wind you'll come to love, the CROSSWIND, this is the 90° or left-to-righter (3 o'clock) and obviously there is the right-to-lefter at 9 o'clock (270°).You'll get to love this wind because it doesnt take too much distance off your shots and once you've learnt the drift values and how to fade/draw you'll find you can stop your ball quickly and use the wind to get round various obstacles.

Right, thats those defined, now we can get on with playing in the damn wind. I'll just treat this in a basic way, but I hope to add a section showing how we can use loft settings to punch shots low into the wind and reduce the effect of a headwind, and hit high lofted shots to make the wind affect a long club even more than normal, which can be useful at times. I should also mention that Paul Willey, in his article in the Tee-to-Green magazine at Links Webring, mentions that the winds at 0° and 180° arent properly straight and in fact there is a few degrees of skew, in effect a headwind actually points slightly left, and a tailwind points right, this does seem to be true (worryingly) so you'll have to keep an eye out on that and maybe aim a few feet to one side to compensate for this...if you have noticed this, then dont panic, just take it into your account, but in my case my snap is so horrible of late that my snap is the thing which moves the ball, not a funny angle on the wind !

The Main Chart

This is the main chart which I have calculated from several hours of hitting balls at Harbour Town, they seem to work pretty well , but remember if the wind changes slightly or the angle moves a bit that will affect things so dont take these values as set in stone, but they should get you pretty near. Don't worry about the complicated columns, that is explained later for those that want a bit more information, for the rest of you the columns to take note of are the first 6.

TAILWIND

Your shots will obviously go much further so look at the club you think is right and then add the tailwind value from the table above ( remember to include things like lies and uphill/downhill as well as green speeds )..if the distance is then correct, play away, or use a click or two of loft to shorten or lengthen your shot, any more than that and you should take the next club and repeat.No need to remember the whole table, just think 40-48 yards extra for 5Wood to Driver, where 40 yards is for the 5wood and 48 for the driver...shots of this length will usually be tee shots or par5 approach shots so you arent always going to stick them close anyway, so for a general rule, think 45 yards for a wooden club ( remember I only use 1W through to 5W). Now you can see that there is hardly any change from 3iron to 8iron, so think 30 yards for those clubs and you shouldnt be more than a few feet out.Complete the series by thinking 25 yards for 9iron and PW, and 20 yards for LW and SW...dont even bother to remember all the numbers for all the clubs, just three or four regions as mentioned.

HEADWIND

Same as above, your shots will go shorter by some way, but dont memorise them all. The 1W and 2W are really hit by the wind and come 50-60 yards shorter. The whole range from 4iron to 3wood are covered by 40-42 yards so think 41 yards for all of them, then a sliding scale of 2-3 yards per club all the way down to wedge.Although a headwind can be useful to stop shots quickly these are often the most scary shots as short irons will balloon in the air and spin back off the green and mis-snaps seem to be exaggerated, for this reason I play a lot of half shots (see section in guide) into headwinds, but this is a bit of a "play-by-feel" method and takes a long time to get comfortable with...

CROSSWIND

First of all you should notice the 4-5 yard loss on all clubs when hitting into a crosswind. As my physics lesson shows below there is actually no loss of distance in a crosswind, its the fact that you aim over to one side that causes the effective wind direction to be slightly in your face.There are two ways to play a crosswind, either by taking the drift distance for the club you have worked out (including the 5yds lost) and then just aim that distance wide of the flag, or play with a counter-fade or draw.The drift 20-28 yards covers 10 clubs from Driver to 9iron so start at 28yards for driver then just knock one yard off for each club down the scale, the only problem with this is that by aiming so wide you are sometimes going over trouble, near trees.For that reason I play a fade or draw to counter the wind direction ( fade in a right-to-left wind and draw in left-to-right wind) and you can see that because of this the drift is reduced considerably meaning your shot is going much straighter, and not over trouble which can be wide of the greens.As an easy rule, play 10 yards of drift for 3iron or longer and 15 yards for any other club, that's a good start.As you might expect, if you do use the fade and draw you are sending the ball more "into" the wind and so the loss in distance is greater, what I usually do is take one full club more than the distance I've worked out if I am going to fade/draw ( ie for 200 yd shot I will take the 3iron, not the 4iron if I am fading into a wind)

Remember the aim here is not to have to remember a whole table but to gain a feel for distances which you can estimate in your head, allowing you to learn the finer points through experience. If I have another windy tip (headwinds), I'd definitely advise trying to stay away from wedges as these can balloon in the air and spin back all over the place, if you can't lay up to leave a mid-iron into the green then try practising hitting shots with a 6,7,8 or 9 iron hit below full pace. Not only will these go lower and have less spin, and be affected less by the wind but they are more forgiving on the snap misses too !

For advanced readers who can happily get through the physics lesson below, then you can see that the last columns in the table above show the effect of the wind at various "off" angles between the main directions. Put simply, dont try to learn this, just know where it comes from and remember the three main cases, 30°,45° and 60° and what the effect on the wind is compared to the on-axis directions.

Late Addition : I've decided that the wind I played in to do the charts was probably a degree less than horizontal ( ie helping ) and that in general the effect of a crosswind is to shorten all clubs by more likely 8-10 yards and not the 4-5 I stated above. Also, when playing a fade and draw against a crosswind that effect will be more and you'll need to take at least an extra club ( ~15 yards ) or a tad more.....see the fade/draw section of this guide for more help here

Yet more late additional info: I just noticed that the cursor (the tee peg) you use to click your meter with is aligned at more or less 45°, so to estimate a wind angle between vertical and horizontal, just put your cursor over the wind gauge and check whether it's about 45° or if its more than or less than that angle.

Breezy : I've never bothered working this out, so if you want a full treatment you'll have to go and do some research yourself ! Apart from the annoying feature that the breeze tends to be much more "flickery" than a full wind, it's really not a cause for concern. I have always treated the breeze as a 15 yard modifier to distance and a 30 foot drift for side-breeze. I'll modify this so I would take the distance modifier to be closer to 20 yards for big clubs, and more like 10 for short clubs, other than that I play the breeze without thinking about it too much, and if you gain some sort of confidence in the wind (by not chickening out on the conditions in practice) you'll probably find that you can play the breeze without thinking, the effect doesnt vary so much across the club range and your other factors like lie, elevation etc will tend to have as much of an effect as the breeze, so I'm rarely that far away using the numbers I just mentioned.

The Physics of Billy Wind

Headwinds are classed by their angle relative to 0°, refer to the table for values.The values for winds ahead and to left are just the mirror image of this figure to the right.
	Tailwinds are classed by angle starting at 180° which is straight in your face. To get winds in face and to right just take mirror image of this figure to the left

Angle	Degrees	Meter Position	Description	Distance factor	Drift factor
	0	12:00	tailwind	+100%	0%
C	30	1:00 or 11:00		+87%	50%
B	45	1:30 or 10:30		+70%	70%
A	60	2:00 or 10:00		+50%	87%
	90	3:00	left-right crosswind	0%	100%
	180	6:00	headwind	-100%	0%
D	210	5:00 or 7:00		-87%	50%
E	225	7:30 or 4:30		-70%	70%
F	240	8:00 or 4:00		-50%	87%
	270	9:00	right-left crosswind	0%	100%

Angle refers to the diagram above, and the degrees is the angle relative to zero (straight ahead). The meter position is given as a time, so 12:00 is 12 o'clock and 1:30 is halfway between 1 and 2 o'clock. Description is self explanatory. Distance factor shows what you should multiply the effect of the wind by relative to the zero degree case (100%). Similarly the drift factor shows the adjustment for the drift you would get for a full crosswind (90 or 270°). As an example, let's look at the case F above ( wind to eight o'clock on the swing meter). Lets say you've worked out that for your club, the effect of a full tailwind is 25 yards and the side drift is 15 yards. Now, the distance factor for angle F is 50%, so this wind will actually shorten the distance by ( 50% * 25yds = 12.5yds ) and the drift will be 13 yards ( 87% * 15yds = 13 yds ).

Now this all looks very complicated but it isn't so bear with me while I explain where this comes from, how you can simply remember this whole table with a couple of easy rules, and then let me confuse you and then enlighten you by explaining why a crosswind does NOT affect the distance of a club, and then by explaining why a crosswind DOES ! ( haha!)

The percentages are worked from some very simple physics related to something called "resolving forces".You dont need to understand this but I include it for your interest. Basically any force can be split into two perpendicular components which can be resolved separately by including the angle between the force and the two axes. Right (take your time reading this), look at the wind direction "D" and imagine the wind is 100mph (wow!).We can split this into two forces, one along the x-axis ( the line at 270 or 90°) and one along the y-axis ( the line at 0 or 180°), and to work out the size of these forces we multiply the total windspeed by the angle between each axis and the wind. So, between D and the y-axis is 30°...so the y-axis force is ( 100mph * cosine(30°) = 87mph ) because the cosine of 30° is 0.87 approx. Now the angle between D and the x-axis is 60° ... so the x-axis force is ( 100mph * cosine(60°) = 50mph ) because the cosine of 60° is 0.5... please dont rush off yet, I am coming to how you can do all this in a second without ever worrying about maths but I'm sure someone will find this interesting.

So, physics tells us that if a man stood in a field with wind "D" blowing 100mph at him, he would experience EXACTLY the SAME forces as if he was stood in the field with two separate windsblowing at him, 87mph straight in his face and 50mph from right to left. This is what resolving forces is all about, and this is why the percentages are shown in the table, the distance factor percentage represents the portion of the wind which can be considered to be blowing on the y axis.Similarly the drift factor represents the portion of the wind which can be considered to be blowing on the x-axis.

You can think about this just from your own personal knowledge...A wind blowing directly in your face pushes you straight back, it does not move you sideways! that is becasue the x-axis component of a wind at 180° is equal to ( wind speed * cosine(180°) = ZERO because cosine (180°)=0 ), and similarly a wind blowing directly across you does not push you forward or back, only sideways for the same reason.

Before I get to the useful stuff where I show you the effect of wind on the various clubs etc etc.. let me finish off by showing you why a crosswind DOES / DOES NOT ! (all will be clear) affect the distance of a club.


Wind is directly across the player at 90°.The dashed line shows the drift distance for his particular shot, but because the angle is exactly along the x-axis there is NO shortening of the distance and the ball goes the same distance as if the wind wasnt there ( the straight line ), but the ball moves to the right	Predicting this drift, the player aims left of the flag the exact amount to compensate for the drift, expecting the ball to follow the same curve as in figure1 and landing at the pin. He is very surprised to see that not only is the ball short but the drift seems to be less ! I can explain this by pointing you to the circle shown here.Line1 is drawn to be at 90° to the aiming line ( where he puts the aiming pin ) and line2 still shows the wind direction. Now we rotate this circle so we can see more clearly where the problem is...	And here it is with the circle rotated so that the aiming line is now straight up. In the game this is done by using the rotate option to rotate your player towards your aiming marker. What's happened !? Well, because we are aiming to the left of the flag to take account of the wind we have to realise that the wind is NO LONGER directly across us...you have to imagine the wind in relation to where you start the ball going. Because we have moved our aim to the left the wind is actually coming in at 4 o'clock and so by looking at the tables above we know the effect is to shorten the distance by 50% of the amount it would if it were straight in our face! Thats quite a big effect, and not only that but the drift factor has also been reduced to 87% of the case where it was straight to the side.!

And that explains why a crosswind shortens your clubs, because its not really a crosswind by the time you've aimed to one side of your target ! The smart ones among you will notice that this means that if the wind is at angle "A" (60°) then if we aim left as we did in the above example, we WILL end up with a true crosswind, and this is shown in the figure below

Again, imagine the player at the bottom of the triangle, and the vertical black line is the line he would take if there were no wind, and we will call this distance 100%. Now if the wind is at 2 o'clock and we aim left it can happen that by looking along our new aim line the wind is now directly left to right, and in that case we know that the short thick black line should equal the drift caused by that particular wind strength for that club, so if we know its about 25 yards of drift for the club we are taking we need the short thick black line to be 25 yards long and then with the wind and angles as shown the shot will drift right at the flag. Again, the smart ones will have noticed something else here, because we are now looking ( down our new aim line ) at a crosswind we know the distance is not affected by the wind, so because of the drift we will get ( short thick black line ) we need a club that goes the same distance as the thick red line and NOT the distance we would have used had there been no wind, as it turns out, for these angles we need a shot of 87% of the no wind - straight case to match the red line and allow the wind to drift the ball to the flag. This shouldnt confuse you because if you just look at the wind, you can see that it is helping.

Right, I am sure your head is hurting now, bet you thought you'd gotten away from school for ever, hahahaha....well, I hope at least some of you found that interesting, and now I am going to show you how you can "know" all this by simply considering the most simple rule in the world which any of you can do, and is 100% accurate if your eyes are good enough !

This method stems directly from the "resolving of forces" I mentioned earlier, where to work out the two components of a wind ( one in the vertical and one in the horizontal direction ) you multiplied the effect by the cosine of the angle between the wind and the axis you are working out the effect for, what you find is that this is exactly the same as considering the windmeter to be in a circle as shown to the left. When the wind is directly ahead the wind arrow just touches the top edge of the circle and when it is directly to the right it touches the right edge of the circle, for all angles between it touches the edge of the circle somewhere between. Now if we draw lines to the two axes as shown, where the lines cross the axes is EXACTLY the same as working out the components of the wind, so by eye you can easily see that the effect of the wind shown in this diagram is about 80% ahead and about 70% to the right, so if the wind would have given 25 yards had it been right behind you, or 20 yards of drift had it been directly right, this wind as shown in this figure gives (80% *25 =) 20 yards extra to the shot and ( 70% *20 =) 14 yards of drift to the right. Simple that, no need to get bogged down in simple mechanics and trigonometry, simply mentally imagine where the lines would cross the straight up and the straight across case and modify the wind effect accordingly.

I guess its time for the golf then ! What you need to know of course is where to aim with all your clubs for a variety of winds, but I think having an understanding of what the wind is actually doing cant hurt you can it ! By the way, another way to look at ALL the above is just to remember that for the wind halfway between vertical and horizontal directions the effect on BOTH drift and distance is 70% ( thats because the angle is 45° to BOTH the axes by the way). Probably the most surprising thing to you will be that when the wind is at 1 o'clock for example the side drift is still 50% of what it would be if it had been a side wind !and I bet theres not one of you that at some time hasnt been amazed by how much sideways movement you get with a wind that seems to be in your face to 7 o'clock..surely thats almost straight down you say ? correct.....but the effect of that angle is still to have a whopping 50% of the effect of a side wind moving your ball.It pays to know what the hell is going on !

club	club length	Drift in Crosswind	Fade/Draw Drift	Tailwind	Headwind	Crosswind Loss	30° or 210°			45° or 225°			60° or 240°
							meter: 1 or 7 o'clock			meter: 1:30 or 7:30			meter: 2 or 8 o'clock
							side	head	tail	side	head	tail	side	head	tail
1W	279.00	28.0	10.0	47	-58	-5.8	14.0	40.7	50.2	19.8	33.2	41.0	24.2	23.5	29.0
2W	262.00	28.0	10.0	43	-52	-5.5	14.0	37.2	45.0	19.8	30.4	36.8	24.2	21.5	26.0
3W	250.00	28.0	10.0	43	-42	-4.7	14.0	37.2	36.4	19.8	30.4	29.7	24.2	21.5	21.0
4W	240.00	27.0	10.0	41	-41	-4.6	13.5	35.5	35.5	19.1	29.0	29.0	23.4	20.5	20.5
5W	226.00	27.0	10.0	40	-41	-4.9	13.5	34.6	35.5	19.1	28.3	29.0	23.4	20.0	20.5
3I	212.00	25.0	10.0	32	-40	-4.7	12.5	27.7	34.6	17.7	22.6	28.3	21.7	16.0	20.0
4I	202.00	24.0	12.0	32	-40	-4.7	12.0	27.7	34.6	17.0	22.6	28.3	20.8	16.0	20.0
5I	186.00	24.0	13.3	32	-38	-4.9	12.0	27.7	32.9	17.0	22.6	26.9	20.8	16.0	19.0
6I	173.00	23.0	15.0	30	-36	-4.7	11.5	26.0	31.2	16.3	21.2	25.5	19.9	15.0	18.0
7I	158.00	22.5	16.6	30	-33	-4.7	11.3	26.0	28.6	15.9	21.2	23.3	19.5	15.0	16.5
8I	147.00	22.0	18.3	30	-30	-4.4	11.0	26.0	26.0	15.6	21.2	21.2	19.1	15.0	15.0
9I	130.00	20.0	16.7	25	-28	-4.3	10.0	21.7	24.2	14.1	17.7	19.8	17.3	12.5	14.0
PW	120.00	16.7	15.0	25	-25	-3.4	8.3	21.7	21.7	11.8	17.7	17.7	14.4	12.5	12.5
SW	104.00	15.0	13.7	21	-22.5	-3.2	7.5	18.2	19.5	10.6	14.8	15.9	13.0	10.5	11.3
LW	79.00	13.3	12.7	18	-20	-3.3	6.7	15.6	17.3	9.4	12.7	14.1	11.5	9.0	10.0
All distances are shown in yards. Drift in crosswind shows how wide of your target to aim in a horizontal crosswind.Fade/Draw drift shows the amount of drift you still get if you use a fade or draw to oppose the crosswind direction.Tailwind shows how much extra yardage a full wind at your back gives, and headwind shows the effect of a full in the face wind. Crosswind loss shows how a club shortens in a crosswind, about 4 yards for all clubs. The second part gives 3 sets of angles with their corresponding meter positions also given ( where the wind points ). The side column shows how wide of the target you should aim for that wind angle, and the head and tail columns show the effect on distance depending on whether the wind is helping or in your face. Example: The 4Wood goes 240 yards by default. In a full crosswind ( pointing at 3 or 9'oclock on the wind meter) I would aim 27 yards wide of the target, and the distance should be reduced to about 235 yards. If the wind had been behind me the club would have gone 281 yards and had it been in my face I would expect to get about 200 yards from the shot.Imagine the wind was pointing at 135°, that is at half-past four on the wind meter...or SouthEast in compass terms. I can see from the chart that I should aim 19.1 yards wide of the target and I am going to lose 29 yards of distance so the 4W will go 211 yards and move 19 yards sideways.