The collision between Gary and Daisy during the Below Deck Sailing Yacht crew’s day off had nothing on what was to come. May 10’s episode finally brought the boat crash that Below Deck Sailing Yacht had been teasing since before the season started, and somehow, it was even worse than it seemed in all those clips. The problems began on a particularly windy morning, hours before the crew needed to pick up guests for their next charter. Soon after deckhand Sydney Zaruba noticed the wind was turning the boat, the stern started scraping against the dock. To get away, the crew had to unplug the yacht from shore power on the dock — which became a problem of its own once the boat was away from the dock, but unable to move in the wind. With chief engineer Colin Macrae off the boat on some chief-engineer business, first mate Gary King had to figure out Parsifal III’s generator system to get the yacht power. But their worries didn’t end once Gary got power to the boat — the deck crew then had to get the anchors up after they’d been dragging. And you thought sailing was stressful!
After the yacht got safely away from the dock, the crew surveyed the boat’s scratches. “It could’ve been a lot more serious damage,†Captain Glenn Shepard said in a confessional. “Like a season-ending kind of damage.†“Someone could lose their life in a situation like this,†reflected deckhand Jean-Luc Cerza-Lanaux. And once Colin got back on board, he added that “it would’ve been a totally different situation†if Gary hadn’t been able to turn on the generator. “I think Gary saved our ass.â€
As it turned out, though, the crew wasn’t out of the woods. When they headed back to the dock to pick up guests, they ran into more issues with the strong winds. “Here we go again, with the wind blowing us into the dock,†Gary said in a confessional. “We literally cannot catch a break.†As the crew began docking the boat, Parsifal III’s bow thrusters stopped working in the wind — sending the boat right into the dock for a second time, in the even-worse crash that we saw in the season’s trailer.
Will this one be the “season-ending kind of damage†Captain Glenn talked about? While the episode closes on a particularly stressful “To be continued …†Glenn shared on a pre-season Reddit AMA that it still “could have been a lot worse. “A repair like that would probably run $10k-$20k,†he wrote, adding that the boat already needed to be repainted. “That is always covered by insurance,†he added. “The boats are well insured.â€