Skip to main content

Eddie Lucas returns for Below Deck Season 9 and begins yet another season without Captain Lee Rosbach in the wheelhouse. Like Below Deck Season 8, a health issue keeps Rosbach from starting the season with the crew. And now Lucas is once again thrown into the deep end. But this time there’s a bit of a catch.

How is ‘Below Deck’ Season 9 a little different than last year for Eddie Lucas?

“Eddie 3.0” approached the old trusty My Seanna, but knew that Rosbach would not be in the wheelhouse. “Lee called me at the beginning of the season, let me know he’s gonna be a little late,” Lucas said in a confessional.

Eddie Lucas begins yet another Below Deck season without Captain Lee Rosbach
Eddie Lucas begins yet another Below Deck season without Captain Lee Rosbach | Virginia Sherwood/Bravo/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images

Cameras capture a FaceTime conversation between Lucas and Rosbach. “I have a little medical issue,” Rosbach told Lucas. Lucas wanted to make sure everything was OK. “I’m just waiting for the doctors to clear me,” Rosbach assured him. “In the meantime, Captain Sean, the delivery captain, he’ll be down there to start the charter.”

Thankfully, Lucas has a good sense of humor about going into another season without Rosbach. “I swear to God if he slipped in the shower again, I’m gonna … oh my God,” Lucas said in a confessional.

How is Below Deck Season 9 and 8 pretty similar?

Rosbach was the first person to greet the crew in every single season until Below Deck Season 8. Season 8 was when Lucas returned to the show after being gone for five years. And while Lucas likely feels like it is Groundhog Day, the crew is lucky to have Meagher on board. Below Deck Season 8 had no relief captain. If Rosbach couldn’t make it, the season may not have moved forward.

As Lucas hinted in his season 9 confessional, Rosbach slipped and fell while getting out of the shower before the season began. “I was getting out of the shower, and I don’t know why they gave me this little postage stamp of a bathmat to step onto when I get out of the shower,” he told Bravo’s The Daily Dish about the shower in the captain’s quarters on My Seanna.

“And the door doesn’t open out, it opens in,” Rosbach continued. “So you have to kind of stand off to the side in order to get out of the shower, and then the sink’s right here on your right. I should have put a towel down or something because it’s marble floors, and marble on water gets really slippery. And I just slipped and fell into the sink.”

Does Captain Lee eventually return?

Rosbach initially thought he had a few bumps and bruises after the fall. Then he worried he did some damage. “I flopped in my bunk and just laid down for a few minutes, and it’s when I tried to get back up again that I thought, ‘OK, this is worse than I figured,'” he said. “So I called somebody from production, I said, ‘I’m gonna have to get this checked out,’ ’cause if I broke a rib, and I did it in the wrong way, I could end up puncturing a lung or something like that.”

Related

Below Deck’s Eddie Lucas Says Producers Tell Crew to Avoid Sharing Certain Things on Camera

Lucas found out that Rosbach was in the hospital only after he got on board My Seanna last season. Rosbach made it back to the boat with broken ribs and a lot of pain before the first charter. And while he won’t make it in time when season 9 initially kicks off, previews show he rallies once again and returns.

Lucas is seen struggling to gel with Meagher’s management style and is seen whispering, “Come back to me my boat daddy.”

Best in Entertainment