Barnacle Bill RACING THROUGH PARADISE

By R.Z. Sheppard

William F. Buckley Jr. does more with his 24-hour day than most of us. He edits the conservative National Review, writes a syndicated column, lectures widely, composes spy novels and stars as a TV Torquemada on his inquisitorial talk show Firing Line. When he is not administering polysyllabic lashings to liberals, slack thinkers and casual grammarians, Buckley may be found afloat. His relish for blue water and white sails is persuasively advertised in Airborne (1976), Atlantic High (1982) and now Racing Through Paradise, books that, among other things, make work and play look like a distinction without a difference.

For Barnacle Bill the Sailor is not about to be caught looking like a privileged idler. On his 30-day haul from Hawaii to Papua New Guinea in June 1985, his seabag included manuscripts, stacks of correspondence and a portable computer on which he wrote letters, articles and, it is suggested, portions of a Blackford Oakes novel. Buckley's boatmates, too, seemed eager not to appear that they were getting away from it all. In addition to sharing sailing duties with a paid crew, the author and three of his companions stood literary watch. Evan Galbraith, a former ambassador to France, was drafting his memoirs. Richard Clurman, once chief of correspondents for TIME, was attending to an ambitious work about the press, and Buckley's son Christopher copyread his humorous novel The White House Mess.

Lest readers and the Internal Revenue Service get the impression that author and friends were purporting to conduct a professional writers' workshop, Buckley notes that the lockers contained a variety of entertainments and diversions. Among them: a cassette library of movies, including The Wackiest Ship in the Army and The Caine Mutiny, tapes of David Niven reading his memoirs (The Moon's a Balloon; Bring On the Empty Horses), and a model of the Titanic that for some unexplained reason was glued together on deck during a heavy rainstorm. Such behavior might be attributed to the decision to pack 50 cases of beer and 32 cases of wine into the hull of the chartered 71-ft. ketch Sealestial (Buckley discourses widely and brilliantly on many points of big- league sailing, although not, unfortunately, on punning for boat names, a practice that can be winsome in passing conversation but wincemaking when emblazoned permanently on a classy transom).

To accommodate the one-month schedule, the route of the Pacific passage was unkinked into a more or less straight line from Honolulu to Kavieng, on the northwest tip of New Ireland in the Bismarck Archipelago. Sealestial covered more than 3,500 nautical miles; ports of call included inhospitable Johnston Atoll, believed to be the site of a U.S. poison-gas depot, where even such minimum security risks as a former ambassador and the editor of the National Review were denied an overnight parking space.

Readers of Buckley's previous boating books should not be surprised that the author is still passionate about navigation. His ideological and intellectual excursions depend, after all, on precise readings and fixed positions. Airborne contains lucid and regaling explanations of piloting basics. In this third leg of what one hopes will become a longer publishing venture, Buckley clarifies the technical murk surrounding such navigational gadgetry as Loran- C, the satellite-assisted Global Positioning System and WhatStar, a computer program conceived by Buckley and Literary Critic Hugh Kenner. WhatNext?