Walk the shoreline stretch behind the Great Waters clubhouse and you will see it change costumes depending on the calendar. On a Tuesday morning it is a golf hole, the water lapping against a green that Jack Nicklaus built to bring the lake into play on ten different holes. Back in early July, that same shoreline became a launch site, the sky lit up while boats idled offshore to watch. And in the next few weeks, as the calendar turns toward the community's unofficial goodbye to summer, folding chairs will go down where golf carts usually roll, because the event lawn at Great Waters is where Reynolds Lake Oconee stages its biggest send-off of the season.
That is the thing about this particular pocket of Reynolds that a scorecard or a dining menu will not tell you. The ground does more than one job, and the residents who live inside the gate are the only ones who get to watch it switch.
A Back Nine That Doubles as a Firework Launch
Nicklaus finished the original Great Waters course in 1992, then came back in 2019 for a full rebuild that redid the drainage, the irrigation, and the bunkering while keeping the routing close to what he first drew. Nicklaus himself called the rebuilt course "spectacular" when it reopened, and the ranking bodies have largely agreed since. Golf Digest's most recent rankings place Great Waters 19th among Georgia's best courses for 2025-26, a course that has held a spot somewhere in the state's top 20 in every ranking cycle going back to 2015.
What that ranking does not fully capture is how much of the course sits at the water's edge. Reviewers consistently point to a routing that varies its encounters with the lake, a carry off the tee on one hole, a green tucked beside the water on another, a cove cutting in front of a green on a third, with several holes running along or through inlets formed by the shoreline. That same shoreline is exactly why Great Waters gets requisitioned every summer for one of Lake Oconee's most anticipated Independence Day traditions. This year's fireworks show went off over the water on Saturday, July 4th, starting shortly after dark and running for the better part of an hour. Because the community is gated, anyone outside the neighborhood who wanted to watch had to do it from a boat on the open lake, timing their arrival early to beat the traffic that builds on the water before and after the show.
For residents, it means the same fairways that host a Saturday round also double as the best seat in the house for a show that draws boats from across Lake Oconee every summer.
September Turns the Same Lawn Into a Concert Stage
If July belongs to fireworks, September belongs to music. The Lakeside Live event is hosted specifically on the Great Waters event lawn, not somewhere else in the broader Reynolds footprint, and it has become the community's unofficial farewell to summer. In recent years the bill has been headlined by Georgia singer-songwriter Rhett Akins, backed by a run of homegrown acts filling out the evening, timed to land right as the lake's busy summer traffic starts to thin.
It is worth sitting with why Reynolds keeps choosing this particular lawn for its marquee outdoor concert rather than one of the other clubhouses scattered across the property. The Great Waters site backs directly onto the water, giving the stage a backdrop that a landlocked lawn elsewhere in the community cannot match. That same visual logic is why the Linger Longer Living Cultural Series, the community's long-running program of lectures, tastings, and small concerts, regularly lists the Overlook at Great Waters as one of its rotating venues alongside more intimate spots like the Rock House. One resident couple, describing the series in a Reynolds feature, put it simply: different venues, same purpose, a different setting every time you show up.
The Week Between Big Nights
Concerts and fireworks are the headline nights. Most weeks at Great Waters run on a quieter rhythm built around two restaurants that sit almost on top of each other but serve entirely different purposes.
- The Overlook, open Thursday through Saturday for dinner, built its identity in recent years around a raw bar that Executive Chef Moore has described as an "engagement station" that goes through two boxes of oysters a night. Beyond the raw bar, the restaurant runs monthly themed dinners that rotate through seafood, Mediterranean, and steakhouse nights, each with its own wine pairings.
- The Waterview Pub, tucked at the turn of the golf course, handles the other half of the week: a quick lunch, a cocktail between the front and back nine, and what regulars point to as some of the better fish tacos on the lake.
Between those two rooms, a resident can eat a completely different meal seven nights running without ever leaving the gate. That is not a small thing in a private community where the alternative is a drive into Greensboro or Eatonton.
One More Course Taking Shape
Great Waters has never been the only golf story at Reynolds, and this fall adds a new chapter to it. Fenmoor, designed by Steve Smyers, is planned as Reynolds' eighth championship course and is expected to open this fall. It joins a lineup that already includes Nicklaus's Great Waters, Tom Fazio's The National and the newer Richland, Rees Jones's The Oconee, Bob Cupp's The Landing and The Preserve, and Jim Engh's members-only Creek Club.
For residents inside Great Waters, the arrival of an eighth course does not change what happens on their own back nine. What it changes is the conversation at the Waterview Pub bar, where talk this season has as much to do with a new layout still being shaped elsewhere in the community as it does with anyone's short game on 17.
That is really the throughline here. Great Waters is not a single amenity or a single view. It is one stretch of shoreline asked to be a championship golf hole in the morning, a fireworks launch site on the Fourth of July, and a concert lawn in September, with a restaurant next door that changes its entire personality between a Thursday raw bar and a Tuesday fish taco. Most communities on the lake pick one identity and keep it. Great Waters keeps changing costumes, and the residents who live there are the only ones who get invited to every show.
If you already call Great Waters home, none of this is news you needed a stranger to tell you. But if you know someone weighing whether this stretch of Reynolds Lake Oconee fits the way they want to spend a season, Riezl Baker has spent more than two decades learning exactly which lawns, restaurants, and fairways make a neighborhood feel lived in rather than just visited. Find Your Dream Home starts with knowing the place the way the people who already live there do.
