A Boy and His Boat

AN OXFORD TEENAGER SPENDS THE SUMMER OF 2020 REFURBISHING A LONG-ABANDONED 16-FOOT SAILBOAT.

A Boy & His Boat

WRITTEN BY LESLIE CRISS | PHOTOGRAPHED BY JOE WORTHEM

After spring break 2020, schools in Oxford and beyond canceled the remainder of the school year. The country was, after all, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In those early days of quarantine and virtual classes, if any, many kids didn’t mind the extended break. But for students like then-13-year-old Knox Laws, boredom began to blossom. Oh, he wasn’t complaining. He was sleeping late, catching up on some favorite shows, and he’d shaved his head on a dare from his dad.

“We were facing six months with nothing to do,” Laws said. “I was watching Netflix all day long.”

Then his parents told him he needed to find a job.

Not long after that suggestion surfaced, Laws was spending time with his parents, Chandler and Andy Laws, and younger brother, Latham, on the family’s 92-acre farm near Sardis.

An encounter with neighbor Joe Castleman proved serendipitous.

“We were just talking, and Mr. Joe told me there was an old sailboat out in the field,” Laws said. “He told me the boat had never been in the water and that I could have it if I wanted it. I then convinced my parents I had found my summer job.”

The boat, after bearing the brunt of the elements for a decade or two, was not expected to be in the best of shape.

“There was a tree growing up through it,” Laws said. “And ants were living in the tree.”

After a few minor hiccups with a boat trailer, father and son eventually got Laws’ summer project to its renovation spot outside the family’s Oxford home.

The first three days Laws pressurewashed and scrubbed his boat, a 16-foot day sailer, multiple times. On the fourth day,

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1. The original state of Knox Laws’ sailboat, before renovations. 2-4. Laws estimates he spent more than 200 hours last summer sanding, repairing and painting the boat. 5. Once ready to sail, Blackjack Summer Sailing Camp instructor Charley Sabatier helped Laws to rig the boat. 6. Laws poses with the boat’s original owner and namesake, Joe Castleman.

Laws’ toiling took a tedious turn.

“After I got the boat clean, I sanded,” he said. “And I sanded and sanded and sanded.”

Each day — or as often as he could — Laws kept a journal in the form of a blog, documenting his progress on the sailboat through paragraphs and photographs. The first-time blogger named his online offering “Mastering the Art of Living with Knox Laws.”

“Sanding was the hardest part of the process,” he said. “I used four or five different kinds of sanders. It’s a huge deal. Sometimes I sanded too hard; in other spots I didn’t sand hard enough. My dad checked on my progress and helped me learn how to better use a sander.”

Along with sanding, Laws learned to use a Dremel, which opens fiberglass cracks so they can be filled in with gel coat.

“This is no hyperbole,” Laws said. “There were more than 1,000 holes that needed to be Dremeled.”

Later came the application of the gel coat, several coats of primer and finally, a couple coats of white paint. The white paint is paired with Sapphire Blue, which Laws said he thinks falls somewhere in between royal and navy blues.

The original sails had been folded in a bag and kept in a barn, so they were in pristine condition. Rigging the sailboat, named The Castleman in honor of the boat’s original owner, came on the final day of restoration. Laws’ friend Charley Sabatier, a physics teacher at Oxford High School who served as a counselor at a summer sailing camp at Sardis Lake, was helpful in teaching Laws about rigging his boat.

Though the sailboat restoration was Laws’ summer project, he gives credit and thanks to his mom and dad for their help.

“It was very hot,” he said. “I burned a lot of calories, wore sunscreen and drank lots of water. I had swimming practice in the mornings, then I’d work on the boat.”

Laws became a member of the Oxford High School varsity swim team as a seventhgrader. He also runs track and cross country, is a Scout who hopes to achieve his Eagle Scout rank by the age of 15 and has become very interested in mountain biking.

He read two books throughout the process that proved to be helpful, but when his patience wore thin, he also learned a lot from consulting YouTube videos on sailboats and sailing.

Since finishing the sailboat, Laws has sailed The Castleman in Sardis Lake a number of times, but he describes the first

trip as unforgettable.

“It was so exciting,” Laws said. “All I could think was, ‘Man, it works. It doesn’t sink.”

Laws did not log all the time he spent working on his boat, but he has a guess.

“In all, I probably spent more than 200 hours on the boat, last summer,” said the rising eighth-grader at Oxford Middle School. “I took breaks from time to time for days or a week at a time, usually waiting for gel coat or other needed things to come in.”

Laws’ refurbished boat is not his first foray into the world of sailing. When he was 10, he attended Blackjack Summer Sailing Camp at Sardis Lake two years in a row.

And this summer, Laws will attend a three-week summer camp in which he’ll sail in the Caribbean on a 30-foot sailboat.

“We’ll sleep on the boat in hammocks under the stars,” he said. “It was cancelled last summer, so I’m excited to finally get to do this.”

Laws’ summer project was, he said, one of the hardest things he has ever done, but he learned much. He set a deadline for himself to finish the boat before school started last fall, and he met his deadline.

“The experience was so worth the work,” he said. “It was fun and now I have this great sailboat as a result. This will be really good for my college resume.”

Knox Laws takes his newly finished sailboat, The Castleman, out on Sardis Lake for the first time.