Running Against the Tide

by Captain Lee

  “Do I have to do any on-camera bullshit? Or can I just do my job?”

  “They’ve got a guy they hired as the captain. But he doesn’t have any time on the boat, and you do, so I’d like you to be there, just in case. All you’d have to do is keep an eye on the boat.”

  “I think I’m qualified for that.”

  “And get paid.”

  “I’m definitely qualified for that.”

  “Great! Should be a pretty uncomplicated in-and-out.”

  But as I’d learned from my earliest trips with Crazy George, or when I had worked that simple sail that turned out to be a drug boat, uncomplicated jobs could be surprisingly complicated.

  By the time I arrived, there was already a problem. Kevin, the guy that Bravo had hired to be the captain, was qualified to captain the boat. That is to say, he had a license that allowed him to sit behind the wheel of a 165-foot yacht. However, the insurance people weren’t so sure about that. Yes, he had the proper license, but he just didn’t have enough experience to make them comfortable enough to insure him.

  One of the producers had an idea that he thought might solve all their problems.

  “Lee, you’re licensed for this boat, right?”

  “It’s one of the requirements of being the captain.”

  “And the insurance company insures it with you as captain?”

  “Wouldn’t be much point to hiring me if they didn’t.”

  “Yeah, yeah, we’re learning that. So, what about this: since you’re here anyway, what if we have Kevin, our captain, be, like, the ‘pretend’ captain?”

  Always be skeptical of a man giving you air quotes.

  “What’s a ‘pretend’ captain?” I asked.

  “Well, you’d do all the captain stuff. You’d be the real captain. But any time that they need something, people would go to Kevin first, and pretend he was the captain, then they’d go to you, for the real stuff. Like, they’d put the camera on him to drive the boat, but you’d really be doing it from one of the wing stations. Things like that.”

  “So, they’d ask him questions about running the ship, for the cameras, and then they’d come to me to get the real orders?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And you’re making a reality show?”

  “That’s right.”

  “With a real ship and a fake captain?”

  “More like a pretend captain. He’s not an actor or anything. He’s really a captain. He would just pretend to be the captain for this boat, when you’re the real captain. Like a secret captain.”

  “And you’d pay me real money to be this secret captain?”

  “Absolutely.”

  That was certainly intriguing. I was already getting paid by the owner to babysit the boat. Now I might be getting paid by the TV people to babysit the captain? They had my attention, but it just didn’t seem kosher to me.

  “So, I get paid twice to do one job? Sure, I can swing that.” But I knew in reality that it wouldn’t work. On any vessel, there can be only one captain. It’s like the laws of physics that never change. As they said in the cult classic Sean Connery movie Highlander, there can be only one.

  Here was the problem, a problem that pretty much no one involved could have possibly foreseen except me: as everyone who is in yachting knows, the captain is a pretty integral part of running a charter boat. Nothing, and I mean nothing, happens without him or her.

  It just wouldn’t work. If someone had a problem with the engines or the generators or the water stores or the crew, they’d have to come to the captain. The captain is the boss. You can’t try to produce episodes of Top Chef with pretend chefs, you couldn’t make Project Runway with pretend designers, and you can’t make a reality show about a yacht with a pretend captain.

  So that’s how I got on the show. They needed a captain, and I happened to be the captain of the boat they planned on filming on. Package deal, I guess. Plus, it made things easier all the way around. I knew the boat, was already insured, and the owner already approved me. It just made a lot of issues into non-issues.

  Even though I hadn’t gone through the audition process, there were still a few hoops I had to jump through.

  Hoop number one: they had to make sure I wasn’t crazy.

  Good luck with that.

  These days, if you want to be on a reality TV show, you have to pass what’s called a psychological evaluation. Because, and this came as a real shock, a lot of people who want to be on TV are total sociopaths who will do anything to get famous.

  This need for psychological vetting got started back in the nineties, when tragedy hit The Jenny Jones Show. Jones was doing a show about secret crushes and managed to convince a man named Jonathan Schmitz to participate in the show, because someone had revealed that they had a secret crush on him. Schmitz agreed, believing that the crush was from a woman (as the show’s staff had implied). He was shocked to discover that the person who had the crush was another man, Scott Amedure. Three days after the segment taped, Schmitz tracked down Amedure and shot him to death. He told the police that he’d murdered Amedure because he had humiliated him by putting him on the Jenny Jones show.

  So now they make you pass a crazy test.

  The problem for me was, I like to have a little fun. I’ve got an occasionally warped sense of humor, and this situation just seemed pregnant with comic potential.

  “You nervous at all for your psych test?” one of the producers asked me.

  “Not at all. Sounds like fun.”

  She must have seen the glint in my eye or heard something in the pitch of my voice, because she immediately said, “Don’t screw it up.”

  I wasn’t going to screw it up. But at the same time, wouldn’t the person who evaluated cast members for this show enjoy a little something unusual? I mean, I wasn’t going to bay at the moon, but at the same time, I thought that it might be funny if, during the evaluation, I started drooling out of the corner of my mouth or developing a twitch on my face. Or if I acted like I thought the first mate was a hat rack. You know, something subtle.

  But I didn’t want to get anyone in trouble for saying, “Let’s give Captain Lee a chance to do this, because he’s not a crazy person.” I played it straight, managed to not get labeled too deviant, and moved on.

  A second hoop I had to jump through was a pretty comprehensive background check. They just needed to make sure that I was who I said I was and that I didn’t have any skeletons in the closet. Yet another time I was incredibly thankful that the drug boat I was unknowingly transporting was only filled with secret compartments and not floor-to-rafters weed.

  Then I did a few Skype interviews to show them I was, if not telegenic, then at least capable of speaking in complete sentences. Relying on decades of experience and discipline, I again managed to not start barking like a dog. Finally, I was rated fit for television duty.

  Now came the hard part.

  I’d never worked with TV people before, and because of this inexperience, I ran into trouble on two levels: 1) not knowing exactly how to make something work effectively for TV, and 2) butting heads with the TV folks over who’s in control.

  The first problem wasn’t entirely unexpected. TV people are used to either working in the familiar, controlled confines of a studio, or “on location,” which still usually means “on dry land.” If someone was shooting a reality show about truckers in Alaska, they still had some idea about how to mount cameras to cars and trucks, how to shoot footage in the cold, how to move from the interior of a building to the parking lot, that kind of thing. Unfortunately, we ran into a bit of a brick wall when it came to shooting at sea.

  How do you do it? Well, you point the camera at things and then press Record, but even that skips over some important stuff. How do you get a camera crew ferried over from outside the boat to the inside? How do you put the camera in the water to take shots of the boat from the exterior perspective? What can you mount to a passageway if you want to attach a camera for a long t
racking shot? Does salt air affect the equipment? How does shooting outside in the open air during day or night affect lighting? What’s the best way of tracking a group moving at high speed on the water while water skiing or boogie boarding? These are things we had to figure out on the fly.

  And speaking of flying, we also had to figure out how to fly.

  One of the things that the producers loved was the scale. The ship is enormous, the horizon is infinite, the water is expansive—everything has an epic quality to it. So how do you capture that kind of immensity? One of the producers had the idea of filming with drones. Like many great sea stories, this one began with the phrase “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  Not only was the crew not fighter-jock elite at operating drones, but the hardware for the drones was still in its infancy. That said, a producer, Phil, still thought it would be a great way to get both a wide perspective on the exterior and also be able to add some kinetic movement as the drone moved either toward the ship or away from it. I can’t deny that, in a perfect world, this would have been a great idea. You could get a shot that started hundreds of feet above the ship and then swept in toward the bridge. Or you could start with the camera focused on a single shot of the stern, and then pulled back to show the ship and also the horizon at sunset at St. Martin. It would have been beautiful.

  In a perfect world.

  Unfortunately, we live in a world where the captain of El Faro navigated his ship directly into a hurricane that he knew was right there. A world where the Monarch clan tortures employees for sport, where Alex felt totally comfortable hiring guys like me to sail his drug boat, the Southern Nights. It’s imperfect. And so that drone went up . . . and then crashed right into the drink. On day one. We stopped trying to use drones at that point, and instead got helicopter flights for big exterior shots. Live and learn.

  An important aspect of negotiating technical issues was communicating with TV people about the boat’s capabilities. For instance, they suggested that it would make for a good shot if we could get the (rechristened for TV) Honor to steam right up close to a beach. The problem was, that beach was just too shallow. We were drawing 101/2 feet, and the beach was only about 8 feet deep. We can only go as shallow as the boat displaces the water. So, I had to veto the ship-on-the-sand proposal. This was nothing personal. They weren’t being overly demanding or anything—they just didn’t know the technical requirements for what boats could or couldn’t do. In general, my approach was that if we could do what someone wanted safely, then we’d do it. If we couldn’t, then we’d have to think of something else.

  In addition to the technical learning curve, there was a personal learning curve as well. One of the big problems I encountered early on in my first season: people who wanted to be stars. On a boat, there’s just one authority figure: the captain. He gives the orders, and everyone else follows them. He’s not the captain because he likes drama. He’s the man because he’s earned the right to be the man. This was the root of my trials with Ashley.

  Ashley had been hired as both the chief stew on the show and also some kind of technical consultant. Because of that title, she thought that she was the person who would be calling the shots. But she had no clue what it meant to be a chief stew, much less the commander of the whole boat. She seemed to have a god complex. But on a properly run boat, the only god on board is the captain.

  “Look,” Ashley said. “We’re going to need a new kind of morning routine if it’s going to be the way I want it.”

  “Oh really?” I asked. She was a legend in her own mind.

  “I just need to make it in line with what I’ve seen on other boats I’ve worked on. And there are some things I’m going to need you to do.”

  I let her go on like that for a few more minutes before I beckoned her in my direction.

  “Ashley, could you step into my office for a minute?” I asked.

  She nodded, a smile on her face. I imagine she thought that I was going to ask her how to run the ship, or maybe that I was going to promote her. But that wasn’t on my to-do list.

  “Look, Ashley, I like that you’re excited. But you can’t be giving anybody the impression that you’re the one in charge. I don’t know who you think you are or what you think you’re doing, but the only thing I need from you is to be the best chief stew that you can be. I’m not taking orders from you. Get that through your head right now. I just need you to keep your mouth shut and do your job. Keep it that simple, or we’ll have a problem.”

  She left my office in tears.

  I got a call from production shortly thereafter.

  “What happened with you and Ashley?” a producer asked.

  “Nothing. I just told her how it was going to be.”

  I think they were just mad they didn’t get it on camera.

  I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, but at the same time, I’m responsible for all the lives on my boat, clients and crew. It’s a responsibility that isn’t going to vanish just because someone wants to be the big enchilada. I was happy to do the show, but running the boat would always come first.

  Our days started early. By six, I was exiting my quarters, fully mic’d up. That’s just the way things worked on the boat. As soon as you got up, you got wired for sound, and that’s how you stayed for the rest of the day.

  It was a bit of a fishbowl. On a boat, even a luxury yacht, there’s still a finite amount of space for everyone to operate. You’ll be in fairly tight quarters with the same faces day in and day out. On top of that sense of claustrophobia was the realization that pretty much every inch of the ship was on Candid Camera. While there was a film crew always looking for the most interesting situation to capture on their cameras, there were stationary cameras throughout the ship. The only places that didn’t have cameras were the guest rooms, the guest heads, and the captain’s quarters. Every other inch of the ship was fair game.

  There was a TV crew of fifty or so on the show. That was a lot considering that we had a pretty packed boat already, with a full crew and a full complement of charter guests. Once the day started, it was just business as usual. We’d try to make the guests happy, and whatever happened, happened.

  Still, some people just wanted to be stars. Ashley was that way. I had an engineer, Skip, and he was that way, too. A real fame whore. One time, I thought I gave him a real straightforward assignment, but then things got complex.

  “Skip, do me a favor and change the filters in the air handlers, would you?” I asked.

  “Sure, Captain. I just need to find a camera and sound guy, and I’ll get right to it.”

  Wrong answer. There were about fifty air handlers that he would need to locate and change their filters. It was enough work that I didn’t want him to double his time by finding someone to document it properly.

  “No,” I said, “what you need to do is get your tools and get to work. If production wants to film you changing filters, I’ll let them know where to find you. Now move it.”

  He sure as hell didn’t like it, but he did it. He was the kind of guy who would always try to find a way to inject himself into a scene, but that’s not what I wanted from my crew. It’s not even what Bravo wanted from their show.

  He really wanted to be on camera. And if there was one thing about television that I had learned at that point, it’s that the average viewer wasn’t always on the edge of their seat waiting for someone to change an air filter. Not sure why he thought that was must-see TV. The problem was, the kid had drunk the Kool-Aid. He knew there was a TV crew on board, and he thought that was his ticket to wealth and fame.

  But what was his thought process? His end goal seemed to be that he wanted to be a big celebrity, like Julia Roberts or George Clooney. Is that how either of those stars began their careers? Exuding raw charisma while changing an air filter? Didn’t Skip realize how desperate he looked? I guess not. He’d have a better chance of seeing God twice in one day than becoming a big celebrity.

  The main thing I hop
ed he learned from that little exchange was that the camera crews worked around us. We made things happen through the course of our work, and they recorded it. It never worked in the reverse, where they would give us scripts and we would follow them. There was enough going on in my reality that I didn’t need a writers’ room adding new ideas.

  That’s just the way it is for a captain. Crises pop up, personalities clash, and that’s just part of the job. Shit happens—sometimes literally.

  One time, on another yacht I had command of, we had the owner’s nephew, Johnny, on board, and Johnny was one first-class pain in the ass. He was just eleven years old or so, but he had the destructive ability of someone far more senior. I just wanted to boil that kid alive. Johnny’s primary focus seemed to be the boat’s toilets. Now, the plumbing onboard a yacht is pretty sensitive, so you can’t be throwing too much down there. If you didn’t eat it first, and if it’s not marine-grade toilet paper, it doesn’t go in the commode. Johnny, apparently, saw this as a challenge. He’d throw an entire roll of toilet paper down the head just to see what would happen, and it would clog everything up.

  When that would happen, and it happened four or five times, I’d have to go down to the bilge and unclog it. It was a pretty disgusting duty, since I didn’t know which of the collectors had the clog, so I’d have to go to every one and open it up, which meant draining a five-gallon container full of piss and shit. It wasn’t a joy to look at, and it smelled a hell of lot worse than it looked. Once I found the right one, I’d unclog it and tell Johnny, for the fifth time, not to do it again.

  So, I was down there, with my face right up against the inspection cap, trying to see if this one had the obstruction, and that’s when Johnny decided to really get me—he flushed.

  I got BLASTED. And I wasn’t getting blasted with water—I was getting showered in some grade-A ship’s sewage. It really gave new meaning to the term “shit-faced.” I went to find the owner and said, “Go get Johnny, and bring him to me.” I took Johnny by the collar down the bilge, where I showed him what he’d done, in Technicolor.