Captain Lee Reveals the Surprising Reason Why ‘Below Deck’ Season 1 Was Re-Edited and Delayed
Captain Lee Rosbach was never supposed to be included in the footage on Below Deck Season 1.
He was only made captain of Honor because Rosbach had the experience and certification for the job. But ageism reared its ugly head when producers thought he was too old or salty for a sexy new show like Below Deck. So they tried to shoot around him.
Obviously, that was a huge mistake.
Captain Lee thought his ‘Below Deck’ role was to just drop off the boat
Rosbach is now the face and brand of Below Deck. Dubbed the “Stud of the Sea,” Rosbach looked back at a time when Below Deck producers thought their best way to film the show was without him in it. In fact, Rosbach thought his only role on Below Deck was to deliver the superyacht to production.
“I thought I was heading down to Saint Martin for just a gravy train,” he recalled on the Heart of the Matter podcast. “Drop the boat off, go check on it every three or four days, get paid double pay, sit on the beach, drink foo-foo drinks for six weeks, bring [wife] Mary Anne down, and enjoy life.”
But fate intervened. “The captain that they hired, unfortunately, had the certificate, but he didn’t have the experience, so the insurance company pulled the plug on him,” Rosbach said.
‘Below Deck’ producers learned the hard way that Captain Lee was the ‘Stud of the Sea’
When the boat was left without a captain, the yacht owner gave producers an ultimatum. “My boss is, like most billionaires, he just really doesn’t… A million dollars doesn’t move the needle much for him, so he said, ‘Either use my captain or we’re out of here,'” Rosbach said.
He joked that Below Deck producers were then forced to use “the old guy” in the role of the captain. In order to keep a younger appeal, Rosbach recalled, “They actually tried to shoot around me.”
Clearly shooting around the captain of the boat didn’t work. “That’s why the release date took so long to get out,” Rosbach said. “Because I was edited out of most of the scenes. So when Bravo got ahold of that, I think we only shot 10 episodes to begin with. And Bravo got it, and they said, ‘Well, where’s the captain?’ They said, ‘Well, we decided to shoot around him and cut him out.'”
Below Deck producers had to re-edit the entire season
Bravo wasn’t thrilled with the first cut of Below Deck. “They said, ‘Go back and do it again,'” Rosbach recalled. He clarified, “We didn’t have to reshoot it. But they had to reedit it in the storyline. So post wasn’t real happy.”
Rosbach added that the fame that came along with his new role as “Stud of the Sea” was something he was totally unprepared for.
“I wasn’t totally unprepared for any of this. I really was. It just wasn’t… Well, nobody gives you a handbook on how to deal with this sort of thing,” he said. “I’m just a working class guy. I wasn’t ready for celebrity, or stardom, or any of this stuff. And I still consider myself just a captain that gets filmed doing his job.”
