‘Below Deck Sailing Yacht’: Tom Pearson’s Job Is in Jeopardy – ‘100 Times Worse Than Hitting the Dock’
The Below Deck Sailing Yacht boat crash last year – which resulted in about $20,000 in damage – couldn’t compare to the near season-ending anchor drag, which occurred during deckhand Tom Pearson’s anchor watch.
Pearson had an uneventful night until the winds suddenly kicked up to 31 knots. Alarms sounded and he is heard on the radio saying that he thinks they were dragging anchor. According to his account, the winds shifted within seconds. But Captain Glenn Shephard believes Pearson waited close to 10 minutes before he alerted the team, which could have had a disastrous result. Now the deckhand’s job is on the line as the crew tries to decide if Pearson should continue for the rest of the season.
The ‘Below Deck Sailing Yacht’ near-disaster almost ended the season
Parsifal III ran aground and was coming dangerously close to being stuck. Shephard revealed that another sailing yacht, similar to Parsifal III has been beached for the last year. First mate Gary King and chief engineer Colin MacRae rally from bed trying to prevent the boat from being destroyed.
“You just feel this sinking feeling in your stomach that I’ve never felt before,” MacRae shared in a confessional. He added that the Below Deck boat crash last year couldn’t compare. “This is 100 times worse than hitting the dock.” MacRae and King don’t have time to change into their uniform and they are seen scrambling, only in shorts, trying to save the vessel.
Shephard explained, “The keel, the bottom part of the boat is trying to push through the sand. And if we don’t move now into deep enough water, we’re going to get stuck aground. And we won’t be able to get off.” Pearson is in the tender trying to create enough wake to help Parsifal III wiggle out of the sand and get moving.
Did Tom Pearson ignore his duties on ‘Below Deck Sailing Yacht’?
After several tense minutes, Shephard and the crew manage to avoid complete disaster. They still had to check the boat’s bottom to ensure nothing was severely damaged, but Shephard is deeply concerned that it even happened. “The whole thing was such a nightmare,” Shephard told E! News. “The person [Pearson] who was supposed to be keeping an eye out [was] a massive disappointment.”
“It’s as serious as it gets,” he added. “I mean, there are boats, similar boats, who have been in the same situation where they didn’t recover.”
Shephard talks to the crew and assesses the time he had to prevent the anchor from dragging. He speaks to Pearson, sharing that he had ample time to wake him but Pearson pushes back, insisting the winds picked up so fast, he acted as quickly as he could.
Tom Pearson could be leaving ‘Below Deck Sailing Yacht’?
King is worried that Pearson may not be right for the job. Shephard doesn’t want Pearson put on any tasks that could be a safety issue either. For his part, Pearson is also struggling, wondering if he wants to remain on the boat.
Shephard speaks to MacRae and King behind closed doors, which is when he expresses his deep concern about Pearson. “I’m scrambling to try to find a solution for the Tom problem,” Shephard says. “I mean, I like Tom. But he f***ed up big time. I don’t think it sunk into him how serious it was.”
As a result, the trio plan to keep the meeting to themselves. “At the end of the day if you don’t feel safe having Tom here on the boat, then you’ve made the decision to sack Tom,” MacRae offers. But Shephard isn’t ready to make any decisions yet.
For his part, Pearson recently shared he was bracing himself for the episode. “But knowing in your head that at some point, things do take a little bit of a turn for the worst sort of thing,” he remarked on the Below Deck Sailing Yacht Pita Party on Instagram. “And that’s been difficult because I don’t want people’s minds to be changed, you know? But yeah, I remember that moment. And now all I could think about was what didn’t I do you know?”
