Kate Chastain Calls This Below Deck Crew Member's Departure a "Huge Surprise"

This season of Below Deck hasn't exactly been smooth sailing for the M/Y Seanna crew, but we definitely weren't expecting the events that occurred during Tuesday night's episode.

Not only did Captain Lee Rosbach give Chandler Brooks a plane ticket home after things didn't quite work out with the bosun, but Caroline Bedol also gave her "two days' notice" that she would be leaving the boat. Chief Stew Kate Chastain told The Daily Dish in advance of the episode airing that she wasn't prepared for Caroline's departure. "No, literally, that day when she got back from the doctor, she was like, 'Thank you so much for being such a great chief stew and always letting me go to the doctor.' I remember being like, 'Thank you, I'm so glad you said that,'" Kate explained. "So then, she quits in front of the entire crew, humiliates us. I was literally shocked because she had told me something so different."

It wasn't just the fact that Caroline's decision to leave M/Y Seanna caught Kate off guard; it was the manner in which she did it, announcing her departure and airing her grievances with Kate and second stew Josiah Carter in front of the whole crew. "It was a huge surprise," Kate said. "Like, not only am I gonna leave you midseason, put you in a tough place, I'm gonna make sure on my way out, I'm gonna do everything I can to give you a more difficult time when I'm gone by making the crew think you were a bad person."

Josiah told The Daily Dish during the same interview that the way Caroline left the boat was inappropriate, in his experience in yachting. "I've quit a few boats before, and the way everyone quits a boat is you take one person to the side or you take your team to the side. She knew we were in our cabin getting ready for a night out, our dinner and stuff like that, and she knew all day we were working around the boat. So all she had to do was radio us and sit us down and say, 'Look, I'm really not enjoying myself here.' And if she had kind of said that to us privately, we could have talked about it and maybe talked her out of quitting or involved her some more," he said. "But the fact that she waited for the whole crew to kind of say this speech that she had almost rehearsed to all of us, it was kind of like it was planting a seed in everyone's head, basically saying how bad we were to her when I don't think we were at all."

Kate and Josiah said that they weren't aware that Caroline had been feeling left out and that she was having such a difficult time working with them during the season, which she expressed in interviews on the show. They said they had made every effort to include her, such as making her feel welcome in the room they shared and being accommodating to her foot injury. "We were really patient with her," Josiah said. "I thought we were very nice with her."

And Kate doesn't agree with Caroline's assessment that she and Josiah acted like "mean girls" this season. "It would be better for me if she was happy and part of the group," Kate said, adding that she felt like Caroline had separated herself from the rest of the interior team this season. "Like, she went in ready [to say], 'Yachting can be very much like high school.' Well, only if you think that. I don't think it's like high school; I think it's like a yacht."

See the moment Caroline announced her exit from the charter season, below.

Caroline Bedol Quits the Charter Season