SUSTAINABLE CRUISING PERFORMANCE WITH NPL RENEW SAILS
Ken Lawson shares how his NPL RENEW sails power a lifelong family legacy.
"As a dad, the relationship with your daughters is one of the most important parts of your life. When they are young, they depend on you – but as soon as they become teenagers, dads are not so cool. My greatest joy is that we managed to get our daughters to fall in love with sailing, so that whatever was going on in their worlds, being on the water with their family was always a safe haven. We've had many incredible journeys, and now that they're adults and building their own families, my hope is that continues and grows."
For Kenneth Lawson, a physician from Rhode Island, that is the goal. Not miles covered, not boat speed, though he'll be the first to admit he likes going fast, but keeping the family tradition alive; a love for the ocean.
It started before he could remember. Ken grew up in a family where sailing was simply an identity – nothing fancy, starting with a 1938 sailboat that creaked and leaked, progressing eventually to designing and building a 46-foot race boat. His parents tied a crib to the deck of a Chesapeake Bay Skipjack and tossed the kids in it when they went sailing. From there came dinghy racing, offshore racing, the US Merchant Marine Academy as a third mate — and then a career pivot to medicine. When he started his own family, the instinct was simple: do it all over again.
For twenty years, they have done just that. First on a fast trimaran where Ken taught his three daughters to sail and learned, he says laughing, "patience to a level only dads with daughters understand." Their current boat is a 35-foot performance/cruising monohull with a swing keel and twin rudders, drawing just 4 feet with the keel up, meaning they can get into many of their favorite shallow harbors. The adventure stays accessible and everyone keeps coming back. "For me," Ken says, "I realized it was much more than just going fast, it's about being connected to my family."
The Sails That Keep Them Moving
Ken's sailing background matters here. He isn't evaluating the NPL RENEW cloth the way a first-time boat owner might; he's doing it through the lens of someone who spent years cruising and racing. He knows exactly what sail trim feels like when it's right. So, when North Sails approached him about trialling the then-new NPL RENEW material – a North Panel Laminate built from alternative bio-based and recycled raw materials, developed specifically for cruising boats – his response was honest interest tempered by honest skepticism. "I had the same hesitation most people do with recycled materials. You wonder if they're going to hold up."
What he found was a sail that behaves with more discipline than he expected from a cruising cloth. The laminate holds its shape through a wide range of conditions without the constant trim adjustments a softer woven Dacron demands – closer in feel to a performance sail than a traditional cruiser, but with the forgiveness and durability that family offshore sailing actually requires.
Three seasons on, the verdict is in: “these are rock solid sails. They set easily – you're dialed in in minutes. There's not a lot of stretch, they hold their shape, and I don't spend time chasing trim," says Ken. New England's spring and autumn conditions are not gentle; the boat runs hard upwind, reef in the main, three feet of jib out, the cloth taking the full load of moving a heavier cruising hull. "We're almost always going upwind and it's usually pretty windy. We're often on the edge of overpowered, which is always more fun. The sails do great." After the first two seasons, the North Sails team inspected the cloth to monitor how the material was performing. By the third year, Ken just rolled them up and put them in the crawl space. They looked like new.
The sustainability aspect completed the picture. "Boats are toys, and if you're lucky enough to have one, not having it haunt the world afterwards is a good thing." For Ken, NPL RENEW isn't a compromise in service of a principle. It's the right sail for what his family actually does on the water.
The season ahead is already mapped out: a wedding in Camden, Maine by boat, a run down the Connecticut shore to visit one of the daughters near New York, and the usual weeks anchored off Block Island. "Sailing gives you a love for adventure, but it also adds a level of complexity that builds resilience," he says. "We set the bar pretty low for comfort and pretty high for adventure. And now I sit in my office surrounded by pictures of my kids in their pajamas and a life jacket, pulling a rope, tying a knot."
He pauses. "My proudest thing is that after all these years, they still want to come sailing with me."
