Bill Buckley’s love of sailing might be best understood as an expression of both his love of adventure and his deep capacity for friendship. His most notable sailing ventures, documented in his series of books of sailing Airborne, Atlantic High, Racing Through Paradise, and Windfall, involved lifelong friends, like Evan Galbraith, who roomed with Bill at Yale, his son Christopher Buckley, and Christopher’s old friend, Danny Merritt.
The sailing adventures sometimes involved real danger and included trips across the Atlantic and the Pacific, but the real focus was the celebrations of friendship—the musical performances on the boat involving Bill’s Casio keyboard, the word games that Buckley so often won, and the lack of political talk in favor of a reminder of the spiritual and corporal reality of human living. Sailing, for Buckley, was a reminder of the places of humans in a world created and controlled by the living God.
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