Davies takes first round lead with 65

Laura Davies showed her affection for the DuPont Country Club course on Thursday when she fired a super 65 to set the pace in the first round of the McDonald's LPGA Championship at Wilmington in Delaware.

The two-time winner was an early, two-shot leader over a group of four that included fellow Briton, Alison Nicholas.

But Davies reckoned it could have been much better and when she covered her first eight holes in six under par, she was beginning to dream of possibly scoring the elusive 59.

"It should have been 61 or 60 at the very worst. And 59? It could have been," she said afterwards. "The way I was hitting the ball, anything was possible. But after the first eight, I just couldn't make a putt."

She let slip a 15-foot chance at the 18th (her ninth) for birdie and added: "That was the key miss. If I'd holed it, I would have been out in 209, and that would really have got me fired up."

Starting at the 10th, Davies opened with back-to-back birdies and added another at the 14th before really making headway with an eagle three at the 465-yard 16th where she hit a four iron second shot to 30 feet.

A 15-foot putt for a two at the next continued the phenomenal run but it proved to be her last deviation from par.

For Nicholas, the 1997 US Open champion, a five-birdie round helped erase unhappy memories of this event last year when she pulled out of the final round with pneumonia.

She shared second spot on 67 with Sweden's Liselotte Neumann and two Americans, Jenny Lidback and Allison Finney.