Latitude 38 Article

January 2022 edition- Three strangers buy a boat

At the beginning of 2018, Joyce Dostale, Steve Ingram and Allie Hawkins were strangers to each other. Yet through a series of personal choices and events, they met, connected, and by mid-2019 had thrown their lots in together to buy one of the Bay Area’s iconic ships, Gas Light.

Of the trio, Joyce is the newest sailor. After relocating to San Francisco from Boston in 2017, she fell in love with the Bay and signed up with Club Nautique in Sausalito. Her first lessons were aboard powerboats, which she said seemed “a little more accessible” than sailboats.

“I was completely terrified. I had no boating experience.”

Car ferries and kayaks represented her entire time on the water, so Joyce engaged with her personal motto which is to follow her fear.

“I got off the boat and said, ‘Okay, I'm going back for class two.”

Once she was more familiar with the boats’ movements, Joyce took sailing lessons and there, serendipitously, met her instructor Steve Ingram.

“Steve helped me feel comfortable on a boat,” she says.

Steve, originally from Utah, has a lifetime of sailing experience. He was 12 when his father announced they needed a family activity; they would buy a cabin in the mountains, or a boat. After three days in a cabin, “watching the leaves fall and the grass sway in the wind,” they agreed, “Okay, that's enough.”

“The next week we went down and bought a Catalina 22,” Steve chuckles.

“I remember it like it was yesterday. I was on the bow and we were sailing on the Great Salt Lake. It was a beautiful evening, the colors were amazing. I looked aft and saw my mom, my dad steering the boat; they just looked so content. And I knew, ‘what I’m doing now, is going be with me for the rest of my life.’”

But the Ingrams didn’t stop there. In 1996 they started a charter business — a 65-foot dinner boat, which they ran until the lake became too dry and shallow. And rather than quit, Steve moved the boat, in pieces, from Utah to California. (That’s a story in itself, which we’ll save for another day.)

Allie Hawkins was selling boats at Club Nautique when she too met Steve. Her boss had insisted she take sailing lessons before he would allow her to drive the club’s new Jeanneau fleet. “Even though I’d been sailing for 25 years,” Allie smiles.

Allie began sailing in San Diego aboard a 50-ft trimaran named Utopia. Later, while living on the East Coast, she chartered a catamaran in the Caribbean every year, for 15 years. Her next move was back to the West Coast where she bought a Hunter 41 and ran a six-pax charter operation. She has sailed the West Coast from Canada to Cabo, including doing the Baja Ha-Ha, and is now living with Steve aboard their 46-ft Pan Oceanic, Cloud 9, her ninth boat.

“I just fell in love with it [sailing],” Allie adds. “I feel small in the best possible way. I'll be on a boat and I'll look up and see the traffic on the bridges. And I'll think, ‘Wow, I'm here. But I could be there. And this is so much better.’”

Meanwhile, Joyce’s new found passion had become her inspiration. Having left her entrepreneurial world behind in Boston, she was ready for a new challenge, ideally in boating. So she contacted Steve and suggested they have a chat.

“I had a few ideas in mind. Most of them were six-pax level,” Joyce says. “And he was like, ‘well, wouldn't you like to do a real charter?’”

“You might as well go big,’ Steve chuckles, “or go home.”

The three sailors caught up for a weekend to see if they could work together, particularly in such close quarters as aboard a boat. With the decision made, the next step was to find a vessel. Gas Light just happened to be available.

“We teased her, that the first boat she bought was 72-feet,” Allie adds.

“We're all a third owner,” Joyce says, “so it's a women-owned business. And we really encourage getting females on board and having girl power. At one point we had almost all female crew.”

Gas Light is also being put to work for charitable purposes with the aim of giving more people the opportunity to experience sailing. Recipients include the Blue Water Foundation, and the Charter School in Richmond.

“A tall ship sailing school,” Allie explains. “We take the kids out and we have four stations that they run through. They learn things like navigation or knot tying.”

The trio bought Gas Light in June 2019, just months before COVID altered their plans. But now, with restrictions markedly eased, Gas Light is once again free to sail the Bay, as she was built to do.

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