With her title as lead deckhand on Season 12’s Below Deck, Captain Kerry Titheradge relied on Jess Theron to be a shining example to her fellow deck crew members — but when a simple anchoring went horribly wrong on Episode 13, Kerry worried about Jess’s mental health and the safety of the boat.
It all started when Jess was told to “prep the anchor” at the end of night one of the charter, but she instead began dropping the anchor into the water, confusing Kerry. Jess immediately apologized on the radio, and worked to pull the anchor back up.
“For f—k’s sake, Jess!” she muttered to herself. “Just breathe.”
Kerry grew concerned, and asked, “Okay, is the anchor just hanging?”
Jess assured him she was pulling it back up, as deckhand Kyle Stillie tried to calm her down by saying, “Don’t stress. Don’t stress.”
Jess became visibly distraught on the deck, and held her face in her hands. She admitted to Kyle, “My head’s not here.”
Kerry then tried to drop the anchor again, and told Jess on the radio, “three shackles in the water please.” This time, the anchorage was successful.
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Still, Kerry went on deck to talk it out with Jess. She apologized for the mistake, but he reminded her, “That’s a mistake we can’t make again. You caught it quick, which was good. But that could have really f—ked us up, alright? So just double check everything.”
It was clear Jess was upset, and she wiped her face as the captain walked away and said to herself: “Dude, I could have lost my f—king job.”
Jess Theron opens up about struggling on Below Deck Season 12
It was clear to Jess’s boss, bosun Hugo Ortega, that his lead deckhand was off. Jess admitted she was “in [her] own head” and called it a “long f—king season.”
“To be honest, I’m concerned about Jess’s performance,” Hugo confessed in the August 25 episode. “I 100 percent know that something’s distracting her.”
Hugo, more specifically, worried that Jess’s love triangle with stewardesses Bárbara Kulaif and Solène Favreau was part of the problem. “It doesn’t help that she’s having all these relationships going on in the boat, and it’s starting to bleed into work,” he added. “I’m really worried about where this is going to go.”
Kerry ran into Jess in the crew mess after the anchor fiasco, and asked if she was okay. She revealed the deeper reasoning behind her performance issues, and it involved the primary charter guest’s health.
“I think with the whole guest and the chemo thing, it’s kind of hitting home a little,” she told Kerry. “I don’t think my head’s been there. It’s clearly showing, like especially on deck.”
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She explained more in her confessional interview.
“I think with the charter guest, given the cancer, it really hits home,” she shared. “You know, like I saw my grandparents like that. I was very, very close with my grandparents. When I was younger my grandparents managed a yacht club. And we grew up on the boats. My grandfather was definitely the reason I got into yachting. And I really hope that I can get out of this rut because I don’t want it affecting my work. But it clearly has been.”
Kerry advised Jess to take a break in her cabin and clear her head. Once there, she broke down crying.
“I don’t know what’s going on with Jess completely, but there’s something going on internally,” Kerry said. “A very important part of my job is not just my crew’s physical safety and health, but their mental health too. I just want her to know that I’m there.”
The Below Deck Season 12 crew’s history of mistakes on board
It’s no secret to Below Deck fans that Kerry runs a tight ship, and Jess’s anchoring wasn’t the first problems he’s run into with the crew in Season 12. Early in the season, Kerry was forced to fire then-bosun Caio Poltronieri in Episode 5 after a multitude of what he called “schoolboy errors” such as forgetting the guest luggage at the dock, a banana boat floating away, and miscommunications on snorkeling spots.
“I’ve really wanted you to succeed here,” he told Caio on the June 30 episode. “The thing is is we keep having these little errors that keep adding up. Each time I think that we got to a place of no more errors, we get another error, and the problem with that [is] I’m losing confidence in you.”
A major mistake by the interior crew also “pissed off” the captain on Episode 3: he had found himself “without uniform” three times.
Bárbara ultimately took the blame for those laundry errors. “I’ve been pulled in different directions, doing different things all the time,” she said in her confessional. “I feel like I’m never finishing anything. It all falls on me. I feel like a very bad crew member. This sucks.”
Don’t miss stewardess Rainbeau de Roos’ shocking hot mic moment during Season 12.
