Capt. Glenn Shephard, of the 54-meter Perini Navi S/Y Parsifal III, has opened up about the yacht’s collision with a concrete dock last year.
The incident occurred during filming for the second season of Bravo’s reality TV series Below Deck Sailing Yacht and the collision was aired in this week’s episode.
Capt. Glenn told Bravo Insider that the accident was caused by a "combination of things."
"The boat didn’t react in the way it normally reacts. I was using a different maneuver mode. And there’s a computer in between the throttles and the propeller that adjusts the load on the engine," he explained.
In the episode, Shephard and First Mate Gary King are seen assessing the damage to the transom and discussing the possibility of cavitation or throttle malfunction as potential causes. Shephard told Bravo Insider: "Maybe my inputs were too much for the computer and it kind of froze or didn’t react in the right way. I’m not really one-hundred percent sure. But I was pushing ahead and it was still moving backwards, which is not normal."
"I’ve parked the boat, I don’t know how many times, probably over one-hundred times, and in more challenging situations. On this one, a couple of things just went wrong. That’s never happened before," said Shephard.
Ahead of the season premiere, Shephard wrote on a Reddit thread that the damage could have been "a lot worse." “We were lucky as the paint company owed us a respray of the transom," the post read, "A repair like that would probably run $10k-$20k."