Blue Horizons [INT020]

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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. Compiled from her popular columns in Blue Water Sailing magazine, which she wrote along the way, Blue Horizons is 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." 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. 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 rare journey, one to be savored by sailors and armchair adventurers alike.