98 Boating New Zealand
TOP Frank on
Wylo in New York.
LEFT Wylo in
St Helena, the
isolated island in
the South Atlantic.lives of men – in the league of Joseph Conrad. His chapters are
littered with little epiphanies and shimmering philosophy.
His simple description of emerging from a rain squall is
transformed into art: “Then I turned to look at Wylo. As I did
so a new beauty declared itself: a breathless stillness – a sunny
breathless stillness in which the music of the scuppers tinkled a
pastorale.”
His ability to attune all the senses in his experience of the
sea was unrivaled: “And the sounds! Those around Wylo have
the quality of excitement. The water sounds rise from a soft
sibilance to a shrilling. The winds note in the rigging resembles
a girls’ chorus, ‘Humming’; and from somewhere there comes
the sound of strings plucked strongly-once.”
Observing himself in all this watery miracle was perhaps
where Frank Wightman most shone. He had the courage and
the conviction to openly ponder his place in the universe.“I had decided that solitude at sea is a strange thing: you are
diminished, yet you become much realer to yourself – as you
do in a dream. You live your life in the presence of something
that makes no acknowledgement of you, but knows you are
there. There is between you and the ‘understanding’ that exists
between you and the thing in a dream; tacit and compulsive, not
proclaimed until you blunder.”
It was not only the sea that came under Frank’s compulsive
gaze. In his later years he moored Wylo in the seclusion of Kraal
Bay on South Africa’s southern coast where he had prepared
Wylo before his first voyage. Here too he was able to document
his falling in love with a place, a hard, arid beauty that offered
miracles to his sensibility and in the end became his final
resting place.
His adventures in both his books are written in a way that
nourishes the soul. They are the ones I read again and again,
especially if a life of landlubbing is taking its toll. With his
resources limited, it is sailing and living in its purest form and
this is perhaps the reason his work is so good for the sailor’s soul.
You get the feeling that Frank has thought about things for a
long time and distilled them through his considerable intellect.
Reading his words, you get a strong sense of being privileged
to watch over his diminutive shoulder at the mysteries of the
world and the beauty of the ocean.
Frank’s second book – Wylo Sails Again – is perhaps even
better than his first. Having sold his beloved Wylo in the
Caribbean, he returned to South Africa and to the world of
cities and to the pettiness of life on land. He wrote The Wind is
Free and with the first royalties cabled Wylo’s owner in Trinidad.
“Will you let me buy Wylo back? Her owner Tookie Collens
simply replied “She’s yours.”
As Frank said: “The incredible had happened. The first time
the prison door opened to me it was because I had spent twenty
years tinkering with its hellish lock. This time it was sheer luck.
For who would have thought I could write a book?” BNZ