She’s Back! The ‘Below Deck’ Cast Reacts to Rhylee’s Return [Exclusive]

By Lea Palmieri @littleleap
Published Nov. 18, 2019, 10:00 p.m. ET

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She’s back, bitches! Deckhand Rhylee Gerber will make her return to Below Deck as we learned at the end of this week’s episode and we asked her fellow yachties what they thought about being reunited with their fiery friend. After former deckhand Abbi Murphy got engaged and decided yachting in Thailand wasn’t where she wanted to be, Captain Lee made a cheery call to get her replacement there in two days. So it was Rhylee that packed her bags and headed off to the exotic location.

“I have a new deckhand coming,” Captain Lee tells bosun Ashton Pienaar, which is especially good news due to Brian’s recent knee injury. “Do you have a copy of her CV that I can have a look at?” he asks.

“Oh, you already know it. It’s Rhylee,” Captain Lee informs him. “We’ll see if she’s learned anything.”

Ashton’s reaction? “You have to be fucking kidding me.” He goes on to say “I’m not ready for this,” and “I’m not gonna allow her to rock the boat,” which seems to be more of just a fun pun and less of a truth considering she’s already making comments about Brian such as “I’d fuck the shit out of Brian to where he doesn’t remember who Courtney is.” Yep, that’s the Rhylee we remember!

Season 6 Below Deck viewers will recall that Rhylee was never afraid to be outspoken, especially about wanting to be involved in deck work along with the other guys on the team. Now that she’s once again the only woman on the exterior team, will bosun Ashton give her the work she’s ready to do?

“I think that this is the perfect time and the perfect person to come in because I think that the boys onboard are becoming a little too much of a fraternity,” chief stew Kate Chastain told Decider. “I think Rhylee’s good at her job, I’m happy to have her back because I like her, so I’m happy for so many reasons.” 

And how can we expect her to fit in with this new crew? “Rhylee shakes things up wherever she goes,” Kate continued. “Animals fear her, deckhands fear her, men fear her: as they should.” When asked how it was to share a cabin with Rhylee this time around, Kate said, “Actually amazing. Surprise surprise, she’s a clean freak, [always] organizing. I’d be working, working, working and she had turned down my bed and decorated and cleaned.” In fact, Kate even declared her “better than Josiah, honestly,” comparing the deckhand to the second stew she bunked with last year. Rhylee even had an eye for the teeny tiny room’s decor. “She put a sarong up, gave it some personality. She lives in an RV sometimes and our cabin was about the same size so she was like, this is a space I know how to decorate,” Kate said. 

It’s good to know the roomies got along but, as often expected in Below Deck world, that doesn’t sound like it will be the case for Rhylee and her boss, Ashton. “I had a suspicion that they were gonna bring her back from the start,” he revealed to us. But her appearance caused him to take a few deep breaths and reassess their relationship. “Her coming on again, I couldn’t get emotional, I couldn’t get flustered. My biggest thing was just not to bring baggage from last season and give her the opportunities that she didn’t have last season. Let’s play it her way, give her what she wants, and let’s see what we’ll get out of Rhylee then.” 

That sounds pretty sensible, right? “It started pretty well and I was quite honest with her,” Ashton continued. “From the get-go I said I want to give you opportunities. I taught her how to drop the anchor, I tried to include her wherever I could. I tried to just treat everybody as equally as possible. As it went on, Rhylee’s emotions started coming through and things started becoming more challenging. There were glimpses and reminders of things that happened last season and the wheels just started slowly falling off. When that happened, I had to try and handle myself in the best way possible. I was the leader and everything was on me. I couldn’t just scream and shout back. I had to be authoritative and I still had to lead a team.”

“At the end of the day, what really matters is the charter guests and if they’re gonna have a good time or not,” he said, putting it all into perspective. “Mine and Rhylee’s issues had to take the back burner. I just had to keep as professional as possible while still trying to have a good relationship with the crew and within the crew. There’s four of us on the deck team; when there’s animosity between two people, it spills over into the rest of the crew. That’s something I had to try and manage as well. When her and I are fighting and she made it very clear what she thinks of me, I couldn’t take it personally. I couldn’t be like, well screw you Rhylee, I’m just going to exclude you from everything and however you find your way through this team is on you.”

Instead, he said he tried to take a mature approach to the situation. “I had to take a step back, not take anything personally and still be professional and still include her in things. And still think of the other guys in the team and how they were gonna get along with her. It was a massive curveball that got thrown at me, and in a way, I’m glad it did. It’s taught me a lot about myself. It taught me a lot about what I was capable of. I wasn’t perfect throughout the whole relationship between Rhylee and me throughout the season, there’s a lot that I could’ve done differently and that I could learn from. At the end of the day, at the end of the season, that’s what counts: it’s what you take from the season and how you learn from it.” Well, it sounds like all the yachties will be leaving with boatloads of lessons learned this year. 

Below Deck airs Monday at 9pm ET/PT on Bravo. 

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