Martin LeMesurier has snapped up his European Tour card for next season. Now he has set his sights on a place on The Open at Royal St George's on July 17.

The 27-year-old Brokenhurst Manor clubman tees off in the regional qualifying round at Blackmoor on Monday morning on the first stage of the journey he hopes will take him on to Sandwich.

Five starts, five top ten finishes, 60,000 euros banked and a place firmly at the top of the Challenge Tour order of merit, confirm that LeMesurier's golfing career has come to the boil.

And he intends striking while the iron is hot. "I've all but secured my European card for next season and that's my main ambition achieved," said LeMesurier.

"Another big one is to play in The Open. I've got beyond the regional qualifiers once, but never at Blackmoor, so it's time I changed that. I like the course and I would like to think there's enough to my game now to go on and then get through the final qualifying rounds in Open week.

"Although it doesn't feel dramatically better than last year when I had five second places on the EuroProTour, my game has moved on. All aspects of it have improved, probably marginally but enough to make the difference between finishing second and actually winning. Every time I play, I'm looking to break 70."

LeMesurier says his difficulty breaking into the Challenge Tour this spring heightened his determination to do well once he eventually got to play. "I was on the reserve list in Morocco and Italy. I didn't get to play Morocco but just scraped into the Italian. I enjoyed just playing again and winning the event in a play-off was a real bonus.

"It's just snowballed from there. I got my second win in Luxembourg last week shooting two 64s and a 66 yet I didn't feel like I was playing out of my skin. In fact, I felt pretty tired going all week because it was hot and I'd done a lot of driving in France in the days leading up to it."

LeMesurier believes in doing no more than three events in a row. "I like to get home and practise and the fact that I spent over four months practising before I could start playing probably helped me a bit."

It was back in 1994 when a bright-eyed 17-year-old won the Hampshire Championship, beating current European Tour campaigner Richard Bland along the way. LeMes spent four years in a golfing scholarship at the University of Minnesota where he says playing every week, doing a lot of travelling and living out of a suitcase was good grounding for life as a tournament professional.

America wasn't easy. He often felt homesick and when he left Minnesota, LeMesurier suffered the crushing disappointment of three failures to qualify for his card, once in the United States, twice in Europe.

"It's been a tough road," says the man from Langley, "but I've learned a lot along the way. When I came back from the States I was hooking the ball and hitting about three inches behind it. It took a year with my coach Alan Barber to come up with a swing which I could trust.

"He's helped me groove it in nicely now," says LeMesurier, who has now re-set his goals for the season.

"First I need to make absolutely sure of my card then I'm going to try and keep number one in the order of merit. Later in the season I'll try and get into some European Tour events, mainly to get used to playing alongside the top players. I'm sure I'll find that a bit awe-inspiring at first."