Below Deck fans know Eddie Lucas from his five seasons on the hit yachting show.
What a lot of Below Deck fans may not know is that yachting isn’t Eddie’s main career. Eddie has a career working on tugboats in the Baltimore harbor, connecting the city to the Chesapeake Bay.
The Bravo personality recently shared a story regarding a harrowing experience while on a tugboat that nearly cost Eddie his life.
Eddie Lucas from Below Deck recalls near-death experience while working on a tugboat
Below Deck Mediterranean alum Malia White has launched a new podcast, Total Ship Show with Malia White, and Eddie was her first guest. Instead of dishing all things Below Deck, Malia and Eddie talked about other experiences in the yachting world.
Eddie revealed he got into working on tugboats because it allowed him to work on the water but still have a life. He has made a couple of major life changes over the past few months, including buying a home and welcoming a new member to the family.
Although he’s working on a different type of boat, the dangers are still the same. Eddie recalled one night on a tugboat where he had no visibility in the wheelhouse.
“It’s 4:00 in the morning. It’s pitch black,” Eddie shared.
The wind and visibility prevented him from realizing how close he was getting to another ship.
“I realized I was about not even a foot away and coming in on the ship, and the ship [has]that battle flare right that comes up. A tugboat can’t fit underneath that. And so, what happened was I connected underneath the battle flare with the corner of my wheelhouse,” he explained.
When the two boats collided was the point Eddie was truly in danger for his life because the windows in the wheelhouse broke all around him. The other boat was pushing the tugboat, which, if the tugboat had flipped, would have been extremely dangerous for the crew.
“You can get what’s called shipping the tug. That’s when you flip over, and it’s very hard to get out of a tug when it’s upside down,” Eddie expressed. “But I was able to put both my engines in full reverse and grind my way out of there. But it was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever been through on a boat. We were really close to paying the piper on that one. Yeah, that was pretty wild.”
Eddie thought he would be fired after the collision
Since the accident occurred at night, the engineer and captain were asleep. The engineer hears something happen to realize there was glass, wind, and water in the wheelhouse.
Eddie was certain the captain would fire him once the engineer woke him up. It turns out though these types of situations were happening on other tugboats, too, and Eddie did not get fired.
“We have found out that actually, this class of tugboat had a lot of the same problems because of the lack of visibility in the wheelhouse,” he stated.
Eddie Lucas from Below Deck admitted if the tugboat had flipped over, he and the rest of the crew would be dead. The incident has prevented Eddie from continuing his training on tugboats and working toward his captain’s license.
Below Deck is currently on hiatus on Bravo.