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Gary King and Colin MacRae Majorly Clash Over *This* Below Deck Sailing Yacht Drama
The Below Deck Sailing Yacht first officer and chief engineer didn’t exactly see eye to eye when it came to this issue on Parsifal III as Captain Glenn sheds new light on the boat drama.
On the April 10 premiere of Below Deck Sailing Yacht Season 4, Parsifal III was already facing some stormy seas — metaphorically speaking, anyway.
After Captain Glenn Shephard, returners Daisy Kelliher and Colin MacRae (Gary King missed the first day due to COVID-19), and new additions Ileisha Dell, Lucy Edmunds, Alex Propson, Chase Lemacks, and Mads Herrera made it on board, they learned there was a serious mechanical issue.
While they couldn’t take the first charter off the dock until new parts were delivered, the crew eventually made it out to sea (more on that later).
Tragedy struck again, however, during Episode 7, which aired on May 22, when smoke began to emerge from the engine — a problem chief engineer Colin noted in a confessional was due to “oil dripping out of the turbine.” While Colin was hard at work dealing with the issue, Gary came down to help.
The first officer’s ostensibly hurried approach, however, apparently got on Colin’s nerves, as the crew detailed on Part 1 of the BDSY reunion, which aired July 17.
Why did Gary King and Colin MacRae fight over smoke in the engine room?
“Colin, why were you so annoyed when Gary barged into the engine room when there was smoke?” Andy asked during the reunion episode.
“The engine room is my department. I’ve known about this issue for days,” Colin said. “I was monitoring it, I was right there in the control room, and he just came down there in a bit of a panic and pushed one of the cameramen out of the way. It was just a little bit too frantic in my space. That’s how I feel about the engine room. No one knows how the engine room runs and what’s going in there like I do. No one. So that’s my space, and I’m in complete control.”
Gary then stepped in to defend his actions, revealing during the reunion, “Fair enough… I worked on the boat for three years. If there’s a fire in the engine room, you gotta find out what’s happening… Sorry, bro.”
Following those sentiments, Colin further explained his thought process. “Yeah, and I was watching it — that’s the point. We don’t need anyone panicking on the boat. I had it under control and voiced my concerns to him.”
“I wasn’t panicking,” Gary clapped back. “So you just want to watch a fire burn on a boat basically. Is that what you’re saying?”
“It wasn’t a fire, Gary. I don’t know why you wanna argue about this,” Colin stated, frustrated about the conflict.
What happened with the Parsifal III engine this season?
As mentioned above, smoke coming from the engine was just one of the issues the crew faced with Parsifal III. When they couldn’t even get the boat off the dock in the beginning, Colin revealed he thought the season was “over.”
“Glenn and I were sitting there pretty much thinking it was a done deal. We couldn’t get parts, the engine was full of salt water,” Colin shared. “But I can’t take full credit. I was speaking to previous engineers of the boat as well, trying to troubleshoot the whole thing, and they obviously gave a bunch of useful information because they just brought the boat to Italy, so… It was a struggle, but we got there in the end, for sure.”
Andy then asked a fan question about the “routine checks” that happen on the boat before the crew boards. “The boat had recently just crossed the Atlantic,” Glenn revealed during the reunion. “The part that failed had just been serviced and pressure tested, so… that question if we do regular checks… Colin specifically was checking the engine when we discovered [the issue], and luckily that gave us two or three days advance notice of the problem. If we had waited and not checked it until the guests came on board, we would have been three days behind.”
“I kind of view Parsifal III as the Millennium Falcon, kind of,” Andy hilariously pointed out, likening the yacht to the infamous run-down Star Wars ship that always seemed to make an unlikely yet triumphant return.
“I agree with you!” Glenn exclaimed. “She always kind of pulls through.”
