Before starring on Below Deck, Captain Lee Rosbach already held a pretty impressive maritime resume. I mean, this guy has been dealing with “swinging dick[s] on board ” for over 40 years. That’s a long career, and yet, he’s still branching out into other avenues, showing zero signs of ever slowing down. Next up for this hater of screwed pooches is Deadly Waters With Captain Lee, aka his newest series over on Oxygen.
Anything can happen over international waters. Captains are often privy to pirates, fires, Mother Nature, steak-licking chefs, and sometimes, mechanical malfunctions within their own engine rooms. Oh yeah, there’s also the potential for drug smugglers. Captain Sandy Yawn and Malia White cannot possibly be onboard every single vessel out there, spot-checking each for maritime law compliances, so this tracks.
In all seriousness though, Captain Lee has his own story to tell on this matter. In the 1980’s, our guy was hired to captain a “drug boat.” Thankfully, the former Bravo boat daddy didn’t get into any legal troubles over this event.
Captain Lee’s “unintentional” drug smuggling charter
Captain Lee sat down with Oxygen to help promote his series on their network. When asked if he’d ever witnessed anything suspicious, he noted an event from the 1980s. “I was delivering a sailboat off the Turks and Caicos Islands with two buddies of mine,” he began.
Here, the owner of a Formosa sailing yacht hired Captain Lee and his bruhs to take their yacht to Nassau. Then, they were to quickly bring it back to Turks and Caicos. You see, back then, owners could only keep their vessels within the British territories for six months at a time. To get around this pesky little rule, yachts could simply sail to another country, check in, and then easily have their six-month stays renewed upon their returns.
This owner’s expiration date was approaching, which is how Captain Lee was tasked with this assist. However, “they had a surveyor who was on the boat a day before we left, and the surveyor knew this manufacture of boat really, really well,” he explained. He then added that this surveyor “promptly” called the U.S. Coast Guard to report that “This is a drug boat.”
“So, we got boarded by the Coast Guard, and they stayed on board, drug our asses all the way back to Miami, and kept us there for three days,” Captain Lee continued. Luckily, “the drug hole that was on board was empty.” Therefore, Captain Lee and his crew faced zero legal troubles.
Deadly Waters with Captain Lee premieres at 8/9c on June 1 on Oxygen.
TELL US – WILL YOU BE WATCHING CAPTAIN LEE’S NEWEST SERIES, WHERE STORIES LIKE THIS WILL LIKELY BE THE NORM?
