BLUE HORIZONS: Dispatches from Distant Seas – Beth A Leonard. Published in hard covers by International Marine / McGraw-Hill at $22.95, £14.99. 180 pages including a track chart and eight 8 b/w photos. ISBN 0-07-147958-9

When Beth and her partner, Evans Starzinger, returned from a three-year, 35,000 mile circumnavigation, they thought they were done with offshore voyaging. However OCC members know that cruising is an addiction and that most of us keep coming back for more. In Beth’s case, “After a few short months ashore, I knew I needed to go back to sea to remain true ... to the person I had become”.

This book is a compilation of the columns Beth wrote for the US magazine Blue Water Sailing during their subsequent, six-year circumnavigation in Hawk, a 47ft aluminium cutter, which ranged from Norway to Cape Horn, New Zealand to the Caribbean. A tendency to rather breathless prose in some of the accounts is more than offset by Beth’s ability to articulate her inner feelings: “Most people live within a very narrow emotional band. But until we went cruising, we didn’t realise that in cutting out the lows we’d also truncated the highs. After we left, we ... experienced again moments that we would have been happy to have last forever. But we also had to deal with the moments when we’d rather be anywhere but where we were.”

Even without looking at the cover, most readers would soon guess from the writing style that the author is American and female – a fascinating contrast to another excellent cruise account this reviewer enjoyed recently, also by an OCC member (British, male) full of detail and hard facts but with only a little, almost apologetic, soul-searching. Not better; not worse; just different.

Blue Horizons can be read cover-to-cover or dipped into at random. The eight black and white photographs, at first glance rather boring and somewhat grainy, become eerily effective and dramatic. The sheer ambition of Hawk’s cruise, combined with Beth Leonard’s excellent descriptive writing, justify calling this book ‘unputdownable’.