Following a year in which most of us were barely able to travel outside of our zip code, the new season of Below Deck Sailing Yacht is ideal escapist reality TV. Sailing the gorgeous turquoise waters along the coastline of Croatia, the second season of Bravo's Below Deck spin-off finds Captain Glenn returning with an all-new cast of crewmembers aboard the Parsifal III. And if you thought the first season was crazy, batten down the hatches, because this season is looking even more intense.
“There's a little bit of everything in this season,” deckhand Sydney Zaruba told Sling in a recent interview. “We've got incidents, we've got romance, we've got crazy charter guests. Everything you could possibly want from a crazy yachting experience is going to be in this season. So I definitely think it's going to be one of the best seasons we've seen in a while,” she says with a laugh.
Despite living aboard a luxury yacht, the cast was still affected by the COVID crisis. Due to the extremely close quarters, the production adhered to strict safety protocols, which meant the cast wasn’t able to party off the boat during their breaks.
“On most seasons of Below Deck, you see the crew going out, and having a good time going to the bars. At the start of this whole process, I thought that was something we would be able to do but we realized very [quickly] that that wasn’t going to happen,” Jean-Luc Cerza Lanaux, the youngest member of the crew, told Sling, a hint of ruefulness in his voice.
“We were stuck in this bubble, not allowed to leave, because if one thing goes wrong, it shuts everything down ruins a lot of people’s lives, a lot of people’s paychecks, everything goes to s**t,” Zaruba said. “So I think in that sense, we’ve become more of a community because of it. But it was more intense than a normal charter season would have been for sure.”
While both are good spirited about it now, additional restrictions on top of an already cramped space seems to have inflamed passions on both sides of the spectrum. In a recent Instagram post, chief stew Daisy Kelliher said that there was a lot of hooking up, “even for yachties,” while Sydney said that not having a break from each other amped up the tension.
"You give us a crew night off where we're drinking and we're all fed up with each other anyway, and we're all [not sleeping enough] and overworked, like of course there's gonna be bad things happening, like naturally," she said on Instagram.
Zaruba told Sling that the drama wasn’t isolated to just the crew.
“This season we had some pretty wild guests,” she said, adding with a laugh, “any time you get lots of money and lots of alcohol together, bad things are gonna happen.”
Take the bad with the good and chase it down with a shot of exotic liquor, because Below Deck Sailing Yacht is back (even if we’re still stuck at home).
Season 2 of Below Deck Sailing Yacht premieres Monday, March 1 at 9pm ET on Bravo. Use the link below to sign up for Sling Blue with Bravo and be sure to check out our curated list of the best episodes from all of the Below Deck franchises under the “On Demand” tab in the Sling app.
