The day at Fishers Island begins on the water. The ferry pushes out from Connecticut with your clubs beside you, and the island rises ahead: eight miles long, barely two wide, shaped by glaciers in the last ice age and lying between Long Island Sound and a scatter of lakes and ponds. Saltwater meets freshwater here, and the place is a haven for plant and animal life. Every glance toward the island deepens the anticipation. The Pequot settled this land first. A Dutch explorer named Adrian Block traveled its coast in the early 1600s and called it Visher's Island. In 1889 Edmund and Walton Ferguson bought 90 percent of it, and by 1925 the next generation of Fergusons decided to turn the eastern two-thirds into a private community for summer retreats, with two 18-hole golf courses. They chose Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., who had followed his father into landscape architecture, and Seth Raynor to shape some 1,800 acres. Olmsted wove home sites and open ground together with remarkable care. The golf belonged to Raynor. Raynor is the quiet hero of this story, and its ache. He was a surveyor with an engineering background who assisted Charles Blair Macdonald in building the National Golf Links of America. He learned the principles of design so thoroughly that he became an architect in his own right, though he never played the game. At the end he was in the middle of some thirty projects. In January 1926 exhaustion and pneumonia took him, six months before opening day, and his protege Charles Banks carried the plans through to completion. Fishers Island, his penultimate design and often called his crowning achievement, is a course he never saw finished. You can feel his hand everywhere. Drive in from the ferry and the land is already moving, until you pull up on the rise where the understated clubhouse sits and the first hole stretches down toward a green beckoning in the distance. You change shoes in a small room off the entrance and hurry out. From then on the water is in view from nearly every hole, and the wind rarely stops. Raynor's ideal holes are all here, set boldly along the coastline: Redan, Alps/Punchbowl, Biarritz, Road, Double Plateau, Knoll, Eden, Cape and Short. The greens sit up like stages, guarded by cavernous bunkers that are often penal, and the rough is brutal. At 6,566 yards from the tips, length is not the test. The course asks you to keep the ball in play and to hit accurate approaches. Then there is the ground itself. Fishers is maintained without a modern irrigation system, so it lives at the mercy of the weather, often raw, firm and browned out. The ball bounds along the fairways at speed until a contour you never noticed sends it somewhere you never meant. That is the joy of it. The course was laid out by a man who never played the game, finished by his student, and shaped each day by the sky. The club prefers to stay out of the spotlight, and its old-school tendencies and resistance to change have kept Raynor's work beautifully preserved. Since 1995 Gil Hanse has advised on restoration, and over those years the course has grown steadily better. Getting a game here means befriending a member, and that is simply part of the place. If you are lucky enough to play, grab the peanut butter, bacon and jelly sandwich after the eighth. Before you leave, stop at the Henry L. Ferguson Museum on the island's accessible western end, where director Pierce Rafferty, who helped author histories of Fishers and its neighbor Hay Harbor Club, shares a wealth of knowledge about the island and its golf. Then let the island fall behind you, and understand why Fishers Island lingers so long in a golfer's daydreams.