Captain Lee Rosbach Reveals the Real Reason He "Unloaded" on Charter Guest Delores
The Below Deck charter guest did "one of the most unsafe things," according to the captain.
It's the Below Deck moment we've all been waiting for.
When the trailer for Season 8 of Below Deck dropped in September, it teased an explosive moment where Captain Lee Rosbach appeared to be yelling at a charter guest, "Get your goddamn ass back to this boat — now!" Bravo Insider then dropped an exclusive preview in November in which the charter guest gave what Captain Lee described as "the ultimate f--k you to the captain" by disobeying him and jumping off the yacht and into the water for a swim at night.
Well, that group of charter guests officially climbed aboard My Seanna in the January 4 episode of Below Deck, and Captain Lee had a feeling that Delores might be a little unruly even before she ended up in the water. "I definitely had an inkling that she was gonna be more than a handful," Captain Lee recalled in the Below Deck After Show (clip above). "I kind of got the sense from the rest of the guests that she was wearing thin on them as well, because she was definitely wearing thin on my ass."
Captain Lee didn't know just how much Delores would test his patience until after the guests' Great Gatsby-themed dinner during the first night of the charter in which she got closer and closer to the edge of the swim platform before ultimately jumping into the water. "Somebody called me and said, 'Delores is gonna jump in the water,' and then I saw that 'f--k you' look in her eye," Captain Lee remembered. "Sure as s--t, there she went."
Captain Lee promptly reprimanded Delores for her actions as he told her to get out of the water and back onto the boat, the angriest we've ever seen the Below Deck boss in eight seasons of the show. Stew Elizabeth Frankini recalled Captain Lee being "furious" at Delores, and chief stew Francesca Rubi said that she understood where he was coming from in the Below Deck After Show. "Charter guests are free to really do whatever they want," she said. "But when it becomes a safety issue, and you saw how angry Captain Lee was, it was a full on situation."
The incident really was cause for concern, according to Captain Lee. "The Caribbean when it gets dark and once you get outside that moon that we cast just from the boat itself, anything goes wrong, we're never gonna find her," Captain Lee explained in the Below Deck After Show. "She can be hollering, and she could be over there when actually she's over here. You have no sense of direction at all as to where sound is coming from. It's one of the most unsafe things I can think of."
That explains Captain Lee's unprecedented reaction to a charter guest's behavior. "That never has happened," he said. "I've never unloaded on a guest like that."
Eddie Lucas, who has now worked with Captain Lee for four seasons, agreed that he had never seen the Below Deck boss get this angry during his appearance on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen on January 4 (clip below). "No, it's hard to really imagine a time he's been that angry. But, I mean, if you remember back to Season 1, he did cancel the charter halfway through, and he was pretty pissed off then," Eddie said. "But I think this time was worse because it was just such a slap in the face right in Captain's face, just like, 'I'm not gonna listen to you at all.' This, [he] was really pissed."
Stew Ashling Lorger revealed during the Below Deck After Show that Delores had asked her for some "fish food" before she went to bed on that infamous night. However, Ashling said on WWHL that she never thought things would turn out the way they did. "To be honest, I didn't think it was gonna go that south. I thought people were gonna start to dwindle away after dinner setting and go down to bed," Ashling shared. "But that actually flipped the opposite direction and went absolutely crazy."
Due to Delores' actions, Captain Lee decided to end the charter early at the end of the episode. "As far as I was concerned, that charter was over. No amount of ass kissing in the world is gonna make me change my mind about that," he said in the Below Deck After Show. "Now I've got a real s--t sandwich."
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