Eddie From ‘Below Deck’ Reveals Near-Death Experience – ‘Most Terrifying Thing I’ve Ever Been Through on a Boat’
Eddie Lucas from Below Deck revealed he could have died while working one night on a tugboat. He detailed the harrowing account, which occurred due to a lack of visibility in the wheelhouse where the entire boat nearly flipped, which could have caused the death of several crew members.
Lucas said the chilling encounter came only a week after becoming a mate. He recalled how the tugboat collided with another vessel, the windows exploded in the wheelhouse around him and the boat began to be pushed on its side.
Below Deck’s Eddie Lucas recalled having no visibility in the wheelhouse
Lucas recalled having poor visibility during a pre-dawn shift. “It’s 4:00 in the morning, it’s pitch black,” he recalled on the Total Ship Show with Malia White podcast.
“I was on a tugboat that really had terrible visibility in the wheelhouse,” Lucas continued. “We had a wind that was blowing up from the stern, so it was actually blowing the exhaust past the windows and the floodlights were illuminating the exhaust. And so it was really tough to see that I was actually slowly creeping in on the [neighboring] ship.”
Lucas said his deckhand was trying to send up a line. “At one point I looked over and all of a sudden I caught a glare on the side of the ship from my floodlights, and I realized I was about not even a foot away and coming in on [the ship],” he said. “And the ship [has]that battle flare right that comes up. A tugboat can’t fit underneath that. And so what happened was I connected underneath the battle flare with the corner of my wheelhouse.”
The windows in the wheelhouse exploded upon impact
The windows in the wheelhouse then exploded. “As soon as it hit, just all of the windows around me just pretty much exploded in the wheelhouse, started getting crushed in on me,” the Below Deck first mate said. “Then it started pushing us over. And if it kept pushing us over and then you take water over your rails, then you can get what’s called shipping the tug. That’s when you flip over, and it’s very hard to get out of a tug when it’s upside down.”
Lucas said the boat came very close to flipping. “But I was able to put both my engines in full reverse and grind my way out of there. But it was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever been through on a boat. We were really close to paying the piper on that one. Yeah, that was pretty wild.”
Because the collision was at night the captain and engineer were asleep. But, “My engineer heard something happen,” Lucas said. “I mean, you can hear when it’s metal on metal and things start cracking. It’s a horrible, horrible sound. He comes to the bottom of the steps of the wheelhouse. And as soon as he gets to the bottom of the steps, there’s chunks of glass all over the place, a big chunk of glass. And he kind of comes upstairs and he realizes that there’s a breeze coming through the wheelhouse and he’s like, ‘Hey, what’s going on?'”
Everybody on board could have died, Eddie Lucas recalled
Lucas was certain he was going to be fired. The engineer woke the captain at that point. “It was not good,” he laughed. But said he didn’t get fired.
And added, “We have found out that actually, this class of tugboat had a lot of the same problems because of the lack of visibility in the wheelhouse,” Lucas said. “So it actually was happening to multiple other operators. So I didn’t feel as bad,” he said. But if the tugboat had flipped, “There’s a good chance everybody on board died.”
