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Kate Chastain in 2019
There’s a new Chief Stewardess on board. Former Below Deck Chief Stewardess Kate Chastain announced she was leaving Below Deck and her yachting career earlier this year. Chastain first appeared on Below Deck as the Chief Stew on season 2 and stayed for six seasons until she announced her departure in February 2020.
Francesca Rubi has replaced Chastain as the new Chief Stew on the yachting series. Rubi is joined by new stewardesses, Elizabeth Frankini, Isabelle “Izzy” Wouters, and Ashling Laura. When Frankini hopped aboard to serve as a stewardess, she was expecting to see Chastain.
Frankini confessed that she assumed she’d be working with Chastain and was looking forward to it. “I was like excited to work with Kate, to be honest,” she said on the Behind the Velvet Rope with David Yontef podcast on November 16. “I mean I kind of like freaked out. It’s funny. Cause like right when I was walking up to the boat, you know, My Sienna, like getting onto this first part of the show and everything.”
Frankini Confessed She Had Prepared to Work for Chastain
The new Below Deck Stewardess assumed she’d be walking on the boat to work with Chastain, so when a new blonde Chief Stewardess turned around, she was surprised. Frankini admitted that she had prepared herself to work under Chastain, but that all changed when she met Frankini, she said on the Behind the Velvet Rope with David Yontef podcast.
When asked how the two Chief Stews compare to one another, Frankini hesitated to answer. “This question I can’t give too much away here, but I will say that there’s a reason why I said, I think I would’ve liked to have met Kate,” she said on the Behind the Velvet Rope with David Yontef podcast.
Frankini continued saying that she thinks she would’ve gotten along better with Chastain. She explained she preferred Chastain’s patience, kindness, and knowledge.
“Because I did feel that Kate was so good at her job, she knew her stuff and she was really good at delegating,” Frankini said. “She was a great leader. She was also very patient, she had stewardesses under her like that, didn’t even have that much experience or didn’t know how to do things.”
Another ‘Below Deck’ Cast Member Was Also Surprised by Chastain’s Departure
Below Deck original cast member Captain Lee Rosbach – or Captain Lee for short – confessed he struggled with Chastain’s decision to leave. Captain Lee even admitted that she has become more of a family member than a co-worker over the years, according to Entertainment Tonight. When Chastain announced she was leaving her yachting career behind, Captain Lee told ET that he was, “caught off guard” by her decision.
“I just never, ever saw it coming,” Captain Lee told ET. “I was totally unprepared. I was like, OK… and it was a long conversation. I mean, this went on for, you know, better than an hour or so, and I was just flabbergasted, for lack of a better term, it just hit me hard. And then I started to think about the ramifications of it, you know, because they were huge. … It’s kind of like, OK, she’s gone. So where does all this weight fall now? Am I ready for this?”
Captain Lee added that with Chastain gone, he was thankful to have his loyal Bosun Eddie Lucas return. “We’ve gone through a morph, to say the least,” Captain Lee told ET. “There is a definite learning curve for a lot of people. It was good to have Eddie back. I was sad to see Kate go, and I didn’t know how the chemistry would work between my new chief stew and myself, or between my new chief stew and everyone else because, you know, when you work with somebody as long as I worked with Kate, you can you get a sense for how she’s going to interact with certain people in certain personalities. And so, you get a feel for how things are going to transpire or not during the course of the season.”
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