As Below Deck Sailing Yacht’s Captain Glenn Shephard said toward the end of Monday night’s back-to-back episodes, sometimes there’s “smoke but no fire” — and Daisy Kelliher tells outlet that was the case her newly exposed, but nevertheless spiral-inducing, off-camera hookup with Gary King.
Monday night’s episode saw the First Mate drunkenly reveal on camera that he and the Chief Stewardess had gotten far more intimate than anyone realized — most critically Chief Engineer Colin MacRae, with whom Daisy was newly pursuing a potential relationship.
The revelation came after a few days of Gary stepping up his flirtation with Daisy as a sort of knee-jerk reaction to the fact she and Colin had unexpectedly hooked up after years of friendship.
“I’ve never had an experience like I do with Colin,” Daisy said during the night’s first episode. “Like, we’re friends more than anything, but I could easy see us falling into a relationship because he makes me feel secure. He’s kind, loyal and, like, who doesn’t like kisses and cuddles?”
By contrast, Daisy exclusively told outlet that “there was no point” to testing the waters with Gary after their hot tub make-out last season. What’s more, she was already clear in her own mind that their romantic relationship “wasn’t going to go anywhere” because of Gary’s habit of flirting — not to mention kissing and often much more — with the other female yachties on Parsifal III, including stewardess Madison “Mads” Herrera.
As Daisy bluntly told Gary on Monday’s episode: “I don’t want to be with you because you want to be with everybody else.” This prompted Gary to break his promise to Daisy to keep mum about the two times they’d given into temptation off camera (once weeks after last season, another time about six months before filming for season 4 began).
Hours later, when Daisy came clean to Colin, he stormed out of her bunk, asking, “What the f — -? Why would you lie to me about that? … You f — -ed him twice, you don’t have a f — -ing leg to stand on right now. This is f — -ing bulls — -. I feel f — -ing, like, stupid.”
As the next episode began, he continued, “I just feel weird now. Because [Gary’s] my boy. I’ve talked to him all in between seasons. On the off season, off the season, whatever. [I’ve asked] ‘Have you guys got something?’ [And he said] ‘No, we’re just f — -ing friends.’”
Though Daisy insisted there was no real commitment or serious connection with Gary, Colin called them both “f — -ing liars,” adding, “You guys are meant to be my friends.”
In a confessional interview later, he went put the pieces together: “The chemistry that they have, the way they look at each other, I thought it was all friends. It all makes sense now. It’s just blowing my mind.”
For his part, Gary reflected on the mess in his own confessional: “Honestly, I don’t know why I had to promise to not tell anyone. Bringing it up, I’d say, in a sense, was my way of getting back at Daisy. It’s like, You’re happy to show the world that you’re hooking up with Colin, but you’re ashamed of hooking up with me? F — -, talk about a bruise on your ego.”
Gary naturally played himself up to his former wingman, telling Colin he believed Daisy had feelings (despite her protestations she did not). Daisy called out the First Mate: “The person who Gary is most concerned about right now is Gary. I just think he sees, like, a little toy and he wants it.”
But none of the maneuvering changed the fact Colin was deeply hurt and “disappointed.” He even told his sister and chief confidante that he was “actually starting to f — -in’ like [Daisy], too.” (It’s worth noting that, all the while, Gary was keeping his options open with Mads.)
“My heart’s telling me, ‘Live in the moment, and enjoy what you and Daisy have,’” Colin said in a confessional. “But my brain’s telling me, ‘Just stay out of it. This has got trouble written all over it.’”
Daisy was wrecked. “Not only are me and Colin on the rocks, but now to think that I might be the catalyst of a friendship ending. It’s just a f — -ing disaster,” she said. “This anxiety is eating me up, and I don’t know how to fix this.”
At one point, Gary half-joked, “Maybe just you and Colin and me have a threesome,” but Daisy dismissed that out of hand with an immediate “Shut the f — — up.”
And deckhand Chase Lemacks summed it up best, saying, “There’s so much drama going down with the heads of departments. You can f — -in’ cut the tension with a knife.”
outlet caught up with Daisy prior to the episode to get her take on the unfolding drama.
Of her decision to keep her dalliance with Gary a secret — despite the fact similar storylines have blown up in Below Deck cast members’ faces across multiple franchises — she admitted, “In hindsight, it was stupid of me, and I should have taken control of the situation.”
As for Gary’s strategic bomb-dropping, she told outlet: “It wasn’t right.” Acknowledging that the crew “had been drinking all day,” she called the pot-stirring “a tactical move by Gary. He knew exactly what he was doing … he knew what sort of damage he was causing by saying that.”
And though Colin told Daisy she should have mentioned her specific level of intimacy with Gary even before she hooked up with Colin, she countered that Colin wasn’t “owed that information. At some point, if we had kept going the way we were going, I was going to have to tell him. At that particular moment, I didn’t think he needed to know. We kissed a few times. You don’t need to know my whole dating history. But 100% if we got more serious.”
She also takes issue with Colin’s perspective on her right to discretion and bodily autonomy. Colin was “more upset with Gary,” she acknowledged, because “he felt like Gary had broken bro code. I personally didn’t like that attitude. I was like, ‘This is my information. I don’t care if you’re both men and you think you have this loyalty to each other. It’s my body, it’s my privacy.’ So I didn’t like that Colin felt like he was entitled to that information.”
She made clear, “I definitely didn’t want to hurt Colin or make things more complicated. But I definitely felt there was a sense of entitlement, which I thought was a bit weird especially because, when Gary and I slept together, Colin had a girlfriend. So I didn’t really get what the issue was.”
She added, “We’re not 15 anymore. I just didn’t think it was Colin’s business. But he didn’t take it well.”
And that’s where the action left off in the latest episode as the season passed its halfway point. Though a literal s — -show of flooded toilets had been avoided and what appeared to be a fire in the engine had been put out by Colin and Gary’s ingenuity, the drama in the yachties’ personal lives was still very much churning.
“There was a lot going on while we were trying to navigate our feelings for each other,” Daisy teased about the rest of the season. Looking ahead, she said, it doesn’t get any less complicated — in fact, “It gets ramped up.”
Below Deck Sailing Yacht airs Mondays at 8 p.m. ET on Bravo.
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