Inside a Session
What Actually Happens in the Bay
No mystery, no proprietary black box. Here is the whole sequence, including the parts that are tedious and the reasons we refuse to skip them.
Two Things We Ask For
Bring the clubs you play now, including the ones you are not planning to replace. A driver session reads differently once we know what your 3-wood is doing, and the reference club has to come from somewhere.
Second, wear the shoes you play in. Spike height changes your distance from the ball by a surprising amount, and a lie angle measured in trainers is a lie angle measured for a golfer who does not exist.
Five Stages, Ninety Minutes, One Reference
Opening Zero Pass — 12 minutes
You warm up however you normally would, and then hit ten recorded swings with your own club. We are not judging those swings. We are establishing what today's version of you produces, so that everything measured afterwards has something honest to be compared against.
This is also where we watch you swing without any equipment agenda, which turns out to be the most useful twelve minutes of the appointment.
Geometry Work — 20 minutes
Length first, then lie, then ground contact for anything that touches turf. A driver that is three-quarters of an inch too long produces a scattered strike pattern that no head change repairs. A 7-iron two degrees flat throws every shot right of where you aimed regardless of which forged head is behind it.
Clients are regularly surprised that this stage is where the biggest single improvement of the session shows up, and that it costs a trim rather than a new club.
Blocked Screening — 35 minutes
Candidates are hit in alternating blocks: eight swings with A, eight with B, eight back with A. Not A then B then done. Testing back to back lets warm-up and fatigue masquerade as an equipment difference, and the golfer almost always prefers whichever club they hit second simply because they were more settled by then.
You are told which club is in your hands. Blind testing sounds rigorous but it mostly makes people anxious, and anxiety is a bigger confound than brand loyalty ever was.
Closing Zero Pass — 8 minutes
The reference club comes back out for ten more swings. The gap between the opening and closing numbers is your session drift. Most sessions land between half a percent and two percent; occasionally somebody finishes stronger than they started, which is its own useful piece of information.
Drift gets subtracted from the candidate results before anything is recommended.
The Session Sheet — 15 minutes
We sit down and go through it. Corrected results at the top, raw numbers underneath, and a plain-language recommendation at the bottom that occasionally reads "keep what you have and spend the money on the wedges instead."
You keep the sheet. We keep a copy, which is what makes a return visit in three seasons genuinely comparable.
Three Swings Is a Story, Not a Measurement
The most common way a fitting goes wrong is not dishonesty. It is that somebody hit one beautiful shot with a club and everyone in the bay decided that shot was the truth. Give any golfer twenty-five swings and one of them will flatter whatever they happen to be holding.
We will not report a number from fewer than eight swings, and for driver work the block is usually ten. If a candidate looks obviously wrong after three, we still finish the block. It costs ninety seconds and it removes the single largest source of error in the whole appointment.
The corollary is that we cannot fit seven categories in an hour, and we do not pretend otherwise. Sessions are priced by how long the measurement honestly takes.
Building, Fitting In, and Coming Back
The Build
Anything ordered through us is assembled on our own bench. Shaft tipped and trimmed to the session spec, swing weight brought to target, and every finished club checked against the sheet before it leaves.
Two-Week Check-In
We call after a couple of rounds. Some adjustments only reveal themselves on a course, and lie or length tweaks inside the first month are included with any build.
Annual Re-Check
A short loft-and-lie appointment each spring catches the drift that firm ground and practice mats put into a forged set. Bring the sheet; we will compare it against the original.
Book the Bay and See It Run
Weekday evenings until 7, later on Thursdays, and Saturday mornings from 7am for anyone who wants to be finished before the heat.