Captain Lee of ‘Below Deck’ talks about leaving the Bravo hit, plans for a comeback: ‘I did not quit. I did not retire’

Reality TV star Capt. Lee Rosbach was relieved of his command for Season 11 of “Below Deck,” but make no mistake — he is not retired and he expects to be back at the helm of a yacht on TV in the future. He’s not ruling out a return to “Below Deck.”

“Maybe not this year, but who knows what next year brings?” he says.

Best-known to fans of Bravo TV’s ratings juggernaut as Capt. Lee, the 73-year-old Fort Lauderdale resident sat down for an interview in advance of his one-man show called “Nightcap: An Intimate Evening With Captain Lee,” which took place on April 6 at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Hollywood.

It wouldn’t be surprising if you thought the final episode of Season 10 of “Below Deck” on March 20 was the end of Capt. Lee’s reality-TV journey. It was during Season 10 that he reluctantly and emotionally left his ship, missing several episodes to get treatment for a paralyzing nerve issue in his left leg.

But he fulfilled a vow to return to his crew in time for the finale, an episode that sure seemed like a farewell to the captain, complete with a swell of emotional music as he brought the 197-foot superyacht St. David into its destination port, accompanied by a highlight reel from his decade on the show.

Likewise, a March 27 episode of “Watch What Happens Live,” hosted by influential Bravo creator and producer Andy Cohen, celebrated his 10 years on “Below Deck” in a manner that was part homage and part bon voyage. Popular figures from the show, including former chief stew Kate Chastain and chef Ben Robinson, were brought on to reminisce about their favorite Capt. Lee moments.

Sailing on without its longtime leader, Season 11 of “Below Deck” is currently filming in the Caribbean, reportedly with Capt. Kerry Titheradge of “Below Deck Adventure” at the St. David helm. (Citing Bravo rules about such disclosures, Rosbach would neither confirm nor deny the identity of the new captain.) Reports have proliferated about the change at the helm being permanent, citing Capt. Lee’s health.

But the so-called “Stud of the Sea” says his future as a TV yacht captain, whether on “Below Deck” or elsewhere, is still being negotiated and remains “to be determined.”

In a recent poolside conversation at the Hard Rock’s Guitar Hotel, Rosbach spoke about how a welder in Indiana becomes a Bravo celebrity, his unceremonious departure from “Below Deck,” and his life away from the spotlight, where he continues to mourn the son he lost to a drug overdose.

Fear and loathing

The star of “Below Deck” is a fan favorite for his disciplined authority and unaffected attitude around the wealthy guests on his boat. It’s a style he grew into from the teenager racing a 1967 Mustang around Saginaw, Mich., who is “damn lucky to be alive.”

As a young man, Rosbach worked as a welder on 500-foot water towers in Indiana, a dangerous job that paid well but each year cost the lives of a half-dozen men, he says. He owned a biker bar, breaking his wrist on the face of one malcontent, before Rosbach, at age 35, and wife Mary Anne spontaneously decided to take a stab at running a restaurant in Turks and Caicos.

Rosbach had never seen the ocean before — “I saw Saginaw Bay once,” he says, laughing — and had no experience at sea when, in need of extra money with the restaurant sagging, he signed on to spend a week crossing the stormy Caribbean with a guy delivering a sailboat. Stops along the way included bar fights and scrapes with Dominican law enforcement, interrupted by massive waves.

“I learned how to overcome your fear. You have to confront it, take it dead-on and deal with it. Because there’s nothing out there that you can’t conquer, if you put your mind to it,” he says.

That determination informed his response to the blowback he got a decade ago from the yachting community, which loathed the idea of Bravo focusing its reality-TV spotlight on them. Even if his involvement was unintentional.

Rosbach was working as captain of the 164-foot Cuor di Leone that was booked by Bravo to film the pilot for “Below Deck.” His job was merely to get the yacht to the Leeward Islands, where filming would begin in Saint Martin, then stick around to make sure the boat was being operated and maintained properly.

When the captain Bravo had hired for the show had trouble with his paperwork, and with the clock ticking on production costs, the showrunners asked Rosbach to be the on-screen captain during the pilot episode.

“I was a captain in an industry that was very secretive, the comings and goings of the crew, how they behaved. And now, here we are, exposing the underbelly of yachting to the whole world,” Rosbach says. “The yachting community wasn’t all that nice to me, [saying] ‘You’ll never get another job in this business again. You’ve ruined your career.’ I was basically a pariah.”

It wasn’t until Season 3 of “Below Deck” that his yachting peers began to realize the benefit of the show, which exposed the possibilities of yacht charters to a wider audience.

“Charter companies were getting people from Nebraska and Iowa, Minnesota, who didn’t know that you could actually charter a boat. It didn’t have to be a megayacht. It could be a 40-, 50-foot boat, and you go out on the water, have fun, have a crew take care of you. There’s a boat out there for every budget. So it opened up the world to them,” Rosbach says.

It also created a new source of crew members among young people who did not know such jobs existed.

“If you’re willing to work hard, willing to learn, you can travel the world,” Rosbach says. “And everything is paid for. All you have to bring is your underwear. Entry level, it’s $35,000 to $40,000 a year, and every bit of it is disposable income. You sure as hell can’t spend more than $1,000 a year on underwear, right?”

‘I gave my word’

In February of 2022, the day before Rosbach was to get on a plane for St. Lucia to begin shooting Season 10 of “Below Deck,” he was at home in Fort Lauderdale when he felt a shooting pain in his left leg.

“You know how it feels when you hit your elbow, the funny bone, and you get that electrical shock up and down your arm? That’s how it felt in my leg. It felt like someone had plugged my a— into a 220-volt outlet and left it there,” he says.

An MRI and other tests could not find the source of the problem, and Rosbach implored his doctor to do whatever was necessary to allow him to meet his crew on the boat. He joined the “Below Deck” shoot, delayed by a couple of days, with “a cornucopia of drugs” mitigating his pain.

“I got down there, hobbled onboard. Production was really great about it. They got me a physical therapist down there, a massage therapist, a medic came in to stretch my leg every day. I had to have somebody help dress me. We did everything we could to make it work,” Rosbach says.

The pain and numbness worsened as shooting continued — “I kept falling down, and I’d pull myself back up,” he says — and a Bravo executive finally asked Rosbach to meet privately for a frank conversation about what to do.

“I said, ‘Well, if I’m going to be totally honest, I have to say that right now I am more of a liability to the crew and to the show than I am an asset,’” Rosbach says, admitting they were difficult words to speak. “I’d been thinking it, but to admit it out loud? Yeah, that took a lot. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life. It broke my heart.”

Rosbach revealed his decision to leave the St. David to his crew in an emotional scene that aired in December, one of the most popular episodes for fans on Bravo’s social media.

“I almost didn’t make it through that one. That was really, really tough,” he says. “But I told them I would be back.”

With Capt. Sandy Yawn from “Below Deck Mediterranean” taking command, Rosbach underwent intense physical therapy, working for four to five hours a day at an Aventura hospital, eventually returning to the St. David with the aid of a forearm crutch.

Why not take the rest of the season off? Why allow himself to be seen in such a vulnerable state?

“You have to check your ego at the dock. You have a job to do. And if I had to use a crutch to do it, then so be it,” he says. “Quitting is something that’s just so foreign to me. And I promised the crew that I’d be back before the season was over. I gave my word. I always keep my word. If I’m not keeping my word, then I’m close to dead.”

Rosbach says he was surprised when told by a producer that he would not be included in Season 11 of “Below Deck” — he still sounds miffed that it came by phone from someone he had no previous relationship with. He describes his current status with the show as becalmed.

“I did not quit. I did not retire. I was just not invited back. I guess I can see their point of view. They really couldn’t get a straight answer from anyone on how my health was,” Rosbach says, acknowledging his doctors still can’t diagnose his ailment beyond “a nerve issue.”

Rosbach says he is still under contract to Bravo. “We came to an agreement, and I’m going to be doing some things for them in the next year. Then, Season 12? I imagine they are going to see what happens with Season 11, with somebody new trying to take over for me, see how they do. If it’s too expensive for them, we’ll see what happens. If the numbers take a tank, would I go back? Yeah.”

‘He was gone’

With a year stretched out in front of him, Rosbach is considering his options, including a follow-up to his entertaining 2018 memoir, “Running Against the Tide: True Tales from the Stud of the Sea.”

Rosbach doesn’t place much value on time free of responsibilities and distractions, his thoughts inevitably returning to his son, Joshua, lost to a drug overdose in 2019. Joshua, 42, fought a long addiction to pain medication after an accident left him with a broken leg and broken feet.

“Nothing hits home like when you walk in and you find your son dead. That’s the image that I have in my head, in my mind, when I go to sleep every night. That’s the image. That’s the first thing I wake up to every morning,” he says.

Leaning forward, Rosbach props his chin in his hands.

“He was sitting on the sofa, like this. And he was gone. He looked very peaceful. I thought he was OK, just sleeping. Until I went over and put my arm around him. He was ice cold,” Rosbach says.

Joshua’s death admitted Rosbach into a club that no one wants to be part of, a club whose membership continues to grow in tragic numbers.

“I went to Washington to speak in front of Congress [in 2021]. Every congressman there had a relative, had a friend of a relative, someone close to them, that had passed away from fentanyl,” Rosbach says. “And I kept going, ‘Then why the f--- are you sitting on your a----?’”

Rosbach acknowledges an account of his son and the plague that claimed him might be a helpful thing to present in a book. It would be a difficult story to tell, he says.

“I’m trying to develop the inner coping skills so that now — this is just within the last six months or so — I can think of Josh and the fun times that he had, and the fun things that he did, and get a smile on my face,” he says.

“But I don’t think anybody ever gets 100 percent back. How do you replace that? People that have never experienced it, just don’t get it. And you can’t explain it. At least I can’t. I don’t have the words. I don’t have the vocabulary.”

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If you go

WHAT: “Nightcap: An Intimate Evening With Captain Lee”

WHEN: 8-9:30 p.m. Thursday

WHERE: Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Hollywood, 1 Seminole Way, Hollywood, Florida

COST: Starting at $100

INFORMATION: Eventbrite.com (search “Captain Lee”)

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