Yachting Monthly’s Scottish correspondent, Mike Balmforth, was hooked on cruising Scotland’s west coast since he was a schoolboy. Since then he has sailed into many anchorages of the UK’s greatest wilderness. Now, with Edward Mason, editor of the Clyde Cruising Club Sailing Directions he has produced a guide book to this inimitable cruising ground.

Cruising Scotland, The Clyde to Cape Wrath, is a companion guide to the Clyde Cruising Club’s Sailing Directions. This 222-page hardback gives you a quick introduction on anchoring tips, weather communications,passage planning and getting to and from Scotland before guiding you to the best anchorages complemented with snippets of history, geography and reports from yachtsmen of yesteryear.

As in Conor O’Brien’s visit to Loch Scavaig in 1921 aboard his yacht Kelpie in which he rode out a hurricane and was ‘rescued’ by another yacht when his ground tackle got fouled up and he started to drag: ‘The moral of all this is don’t go up to Scotland single-handed unless you feel sure of meeting boats like Molly when you get into trouble.’

The photography alone is enough to lure anyone who ha not yet visited these magical cruising destinations: from the riddle of the rocks anchorage at Acairseid Mhor through the forbidding heights of the Gothic Flannan Isles to the lonely beauty of the pool in Tob Bhrollum, they are truly ‘I want to be there pictures’.

The one infuriating thing about many such books is that though you want to be there you are never sure of where it is you want to be because so often a locator chart is missing. Not so with Cruising Scotland, published by Clyde Cruising Club Publications at £27.50.