BETH LEONARD

When Beth Leonard and her partner, Evans Starzinger, returned from a three-year, 35,000 mile circumnavigation, they thought they were done with offshore voyaging. But neither realized how irrevocably they had been changed by their experience, nor how irresistible the siren song of the sea would prove. In comparison, life ashore seemed dull and monochrome, and within months, Beth knew she had to go back to sea in order to remain true to the person she had become. Four years later they set out on their 47-foot aluminum sloop Hawk for a journey that lasted six years and took them more than 50,000 miles. They voyaged to Newfoundland, Iceland, Norway, the Caribbean, Ireland, Scotland, Cape Horn, New Zealand, the South Pacific, British Columbia--to the ends of the earth and back. Blue Horizons is Beth Leonard's record of that journey. Compiled from her popular columns in Blue Water Sailing magazine, which she wrote along the way, Blue Horizons is more than an adventure saga, more than the log of an extended passage. As in all great travel writing, it¿s the product of an insatiable hunger to explore the world, and in so doing to explore one¿s own soul. It is, says Beth, "about pulling your dreams over the horizon to you, one sail change, one course correction at a time." But this is no dreamer's tale. Beth Leonard is both sailor and writer, well qualified to deal with and describe blue water voyaging. Written with the vivid precision and practical eye for detail that made her first book, The Voyager's Handbook, such a success, Blue Horizons is a collection of compelling vignettes that encapsulate life at sea with all its dangers and epiphanies, its disillusions and delights. Her observations are as sharp as salt air and her prose as informed as it is insightful and entertaining. Beth also brings to Blue Horizons a uniquely feminine perspective, a combination of empathy, charm, and lyric grace. Her pages are suffused with emotion and a strong sense of immediacy. You're with Beth and Evans as Hawk pokes into a lonely and deserted outport on Newfoundland's barren northeast coast, and as they await hurricane Lenny in Antigua. And you sympathize as she burrows deep into her tilting berth, seeking that one, elusive interval of comfort that will bring sleep on a pounding windward passage, only to be dashed awake by the cold shock of a rogue wave spilling into her bunk. Blue Horizons is a rar