The wind was blowing slightly from the right when Wayne Broedelet lined up his second shot.
The combined sound of the din and racket caused by a prize-giving ceremony alongside him on the deck was nowhere loud enough to drown out the encouragement of wife Kim.
She had seen the first of his six shots sailing left of the flag and advised that he play the next more to the right.
The Sardinia Bay Golf Club president stared back.
“I’ve got this. I know where to hit it now.”
Pitching-wedge in hand, he reset himself.
The strike was clean. The flight beautiful. The touchdown exquisite.
The ball landed pin-high, spun left and dropped into the cup.
After four long years, the wait for a hole-in-one at the Sundowners Deck Shootout ended on December 5, 2025.
“The place went crazy,” Wayne recalls.
“People were extremely happy for me but I was flabbergasted. I’m not one for being the centre of attention. They’re calling it the ‘president’s shot’ now.”
Wayne’s ace on the 7th, the green that players hit to during the shootout, is his second ever. The first came at Shark River Golf Club, also in Gqeberha.
He has come close to holing-in-one off the deck before. Now he can proudly say he got the cigar or, to be more exact, the R4 250 pot that went to the first person to achieve the feat.
Not that there was much left to take home.
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“Everybody who was there had a drink and we paid the bar bill afterwards,” he says. “The pennies that were left were used for our December holiday.”
Ironically, it was Wayne himself who signed off on the Sundowners concept.
The idea came from former club captain Nigel Campbell in 2020, when he suggested a nine-hole competition after work on a Friday.
A year later it was changed to Sundowners, where players could compete across various fun formats. These were eventually narrowed down to the shootout.
Each participant pays R20 for six balls, which they hit from the deck. While prizes are awarded to the golfer who is closest to the pin on the day, the money rolls over if no one gets the ace.
He nearly did it again in mid-February, coming agonisingly close to what would have been a third lifetime hole-in-one.
Perhaps it is a blessing it did not drop into the cup that day.
An eyebrow or two might well have been raised if the man who helped establish the competition and serves as club president pulled off the near-impossible a mere two months apart.
For the 60-year-old, who has lived with Kim at Sards since 2017, the event is not about the money.
“People really enjoy the casual atmosphere. It’s just a fun format to play and people can get together to relax with a beer while the sun goes down. It’s beautiful.”