Did Glenn fire chef Cloyce for cloywning around on Below Deck Sailing Yacht?

When we left the crew of Below Deck Sailing Yacht season 5 aboard the Parsifal III, its chef, Cloyce, was on the back of deckhand Keith, probably making Danni jealous and definitely not making lunch.

The preview for the season and last week’s episode and this week’s episode had Captain Glenn looking as furious as Captain Glenn gets when Captain Glenn is not crashing into a dock.

So I was ready for some actual consequences, and perhaps even a firing. “You should err on the side of professionalism,” Glenn told us in an interview.

But the most punishment Cloyce got was having to flop himself into the tender while Gary stood and watched, laughing, instead of helping.

Gary punished Cloyce by standing and laughing while Cloyce struggled to climb into the tender

“I would happily do that many more times,” said Cloyce, cluecleyss.

Cloyce arrived back on board with 20 minutes until a 4 p.m. lunch and…went to his cabin to clean up and spend time grooming himself. With 15 minutes to lunch, he finally emerged, and that’s when Glenn finally laid into him.

“Oh, you’re back?” Glenn said, so quietly I had to turn on subtitles to hear. “You have enough time?”

In an interview—filmed later, of course—Cloyce said “Captain Glenn, seeing chef get out of the galley for the first time in his long career, possibly surprising.” Can we fire him for being condescending, at least? Cloyce insisted his past captains “didn’t care about me having fun. I’m not worried.”

What was possibly surprising to me was what Glenn told Cloyce: “All right, man. Thank you very much.” GLENN! WHAT THE FRICK!

Captain Glenn confronted Cloyce with this blank stare on BDSY 5 episode 4

I think it’s possible that Below Deck’s famously clever editing may have over-exaggerated the timeline. Because later, Glenn asked the guests, “the way the food came out, was that okay?” Glen asked. The reply: “yeah, so delicious.”

The guests weren’t bothered by the timeline, so Glenn wasn’t either. Makes sense, except: it’s clearly not okay for a crew member to act like he’s another guest and join in on their excursion! Glenn, what the frick!

Before the guests arrived, while Cloyce comybed his hair, Danni set the table and then Daisy fixed it, and the editors showed us a split screen labeled “Danni’s Table Placement” and “Daisy’s Table Placement” made no sense. The on-screen text labeling WATER and WINE glasses didn’t line up with glasses; on Danni’s side, WINE was just hovering there, all by itself.

Gary towed the guests back and didn’t crash, but if he had, Glenn probably would have been like, “All right, man. Thank you very much.”

Once the guests were seated, the waiting began: Guest waiting 5 minutes, Cloyce stirring something, 9 minutes, pulling apart squid, cutting chicken, 11 minutes, 15 minutes, Cloyce dressed salad. The squid turned out to be for dinner, so I don’t know if he was prepping while waiting or that was just an out-of-place image.

The guests were annoyed by the wait: “I have snacks upstairs,” one said. “Maybe in two days I’ll be really thin.”

At 5:15, lunch was finally served; in my word, that is called dinner because it is shortly before bedtime.

Cloyce served chycken, and he said, “I probably should have cooked them for a few more minutes longer. Oh shit.” I thought that meant guests heaving over the side of the boat, but apparently unlike our beloved Below Deck Med chef Jono, Cloyce can actually cooyk.

Cloyce’s harshest critic was, uh, himself. “I’m infrequently wrong, but I did underestimate my timing,” he said. Then he reverted back to his 22-year-old understanding of the world and said, “You know, everything’s my fault, which is awesome. I love that.”

Uh, yes, lunch is your fault because it’s your responsibility. Though I’ll also blame you for this recap if you like.

The other major unresolved storyline was a storyline I did not think needed to be resolved: deckhand Emma moping about because Gary had to correct her and chastised her for not doing a task.

You’ll recall that, previously, Emma sat smoking on the back of the boat while the tender banged into the boat repeatedly behind her, and she did not notice. Cue Emma once again sitting on the back of the boat, smoking. Behind her, Elvis swam by and aliens landed.

Emma told us that “Gary snapping at me” was embarrassing because she finds “failure embarrassing.” I find it embarrassing that I can never spell “embarrassing” the first time.

Back inside, she told Daisy, “I’ve just continued to fuck up today,” as Gary walked by and overheard.

“I honestly feel like I’m surrounded by people who are great at everything they do, and I’m just struggling like a fucking idiot,” Emma said.

Maybe step into the galley for a minute and you’ll feel better? Or go hang out by that deckhand who didn’t notice the tender banging into the—oh wait, never mind, that was you.

“I’m just too old for this shit,” she said later, packing up chairs.

The other deckhand, Keith, is still getting attention from Danni, who tried to tickle his calloused feet, and got no response, which is a heck of a metaphor. Keith told us “it’s all kind of surface level stuff” from her. Danni is just so desperate for Keith to pay attention to her, so I guess it’s no surprise she ends up with Gary next week, 🤢.

It was time for primary guest Amy’s 60th birthday party, held near Es Vedra island, which Glenn tried to spook the guests by saying “they say it’s haunted by mermaids,” and they told him they wanted to go out there on the tender at night and sacrifice a crew member.

For this party, they hired a mermaid, who self-described “boat bitch” Davide helped carry to the swim platform once she’d put on her mermaid tail.

Meanwhile, Cloyce prepared by buying a “shitty cake from shitty bakery,” she said. There goes that sponsorship. Wouldn’t it have been hilarious if he’d bought Fudgie the Whale and Daisy called it a shitty cake and the editors had to blur it out and it was clearly Fudgie the Whale?

Alas, it was nothing close to the deliciousness that is Fudgie, but looked like the pineapple upside-down cake we made on Boy Scout camping trips on a camp stove, so it always came out looking like a pile of ingredients.

The guests went down to the swim platform for their mermaid show, and I have to say that the crew gets a big C- for this one, just leaving the mermaid sitting there. At first I thought she wasn’t going to go in the water, but she did. So why didn’t she swim up to surprise them?

“You don’t see a mermaid every day,” a guest said. Then Emma harpooned the mermaid. Yep, bad at everything!

During this “show,” Daisy asked Diana to do cabins and Diana said, “Why am I doing cabins?” Um, because that is your job? You clean and serve.

There was a minor back-and-forth that was too uninteresting to pay attention to, especially since later, Diana and Danni apologized to each other while cleaning, and joked around in an interview.

Speaking of people who don’t seem to know what their jobs are, Cloyce told us, “Tonight has to be absolutely flawless, and I’m all ready to rock and roll.” Going to put rocks on a roll and serve it? Oh wait, I forgot, not Jono.

Captain Glenn joined the guests, and got to wear sticker bling that primary guest Amy graciously loaned him. “Here, give Captain Glenn the ones off my breast,” she said, and one of her daughters affixed it to Glenn’s forehead.

Then they asked Glenn his age: 63, he said. One of the guests—I could not be bothered to tell them apart—said, “You look so young, especially for being out in the sun all the time—it ages you really fast.” I know: You should see Sue on Survivor. She’s 36!

“I fucking hate making cakes,” Cloyce complained, and shared his worldly knowledge. “An older woman, I’m expecting she wants her birthday to consist of mostly drinking. Nobody in their 60s is super-stoked to blow out some candles; you just want to party.”

No, that’s people in their 20s. But: despite that gross overgeneralization, he seemed to be right about Amy, who drank from a huge champagne bottle and ignored the pathetic cake on plates.

Cloyce heated up the cake, and it fell apart completely. “He was being lazy,” Daisy said, and “it looks like a pile of dogshit. It’s horrific.”

After piling the chunks of hot, broken whatever it was, Cloyce coyvered it was inartfully piped frosting, so now it looked like dogshit that’d been in the sun for days.

They brought the cake up on individual plates, because you can’t cut that shit in front of them, and sang “Happy Birthday,” and no one appeared to eat any. Amy just went to bed: “Nothing good ever happens after 12 o’clock,” she said.

That was right: the DJ stripped off his shirt, got in the hot tub, got some legs wrapped around him, and then fled faster than Keith being pursued by Danni.

The next day, the boat docked, and Emma didn’t get her lines tight enough, so Gary showed her while she sat next to him, pouting. “This is the first thing you learn working on boats, and she’s worked on boats for years,” Gary said. “Does she not care? Does she not know? Am I a bad teacher?” Do we have an “all of the above”?

Daisy pulled Glenn aside to say, “I think the chef’s going to be an issue,” which is a bit like saying, “I think the dock’s going to be a bit of an issue” after the Parsifal III smashed into it.

“I think he can do it,” Glenn said, telling Daisy to “try to handle it in a way that we’ll get what we want.” Not a bad idea, but also, I wonder how much of that is due to the desperation over the fact that this franchise can no longer seem to find anyone who wants to do these jobs.

Below Deck Sailing Yacht season 5 chief stew Daisy is back, and so is her drama with Gary

Amy left a $25,000 tip, and the crew prepared for a night out, but first Daisy had Diana and Danni make everyone cocktails so they could practice. I don’t know why she thought they’d be up for this, since they aren’t up for working when they’re on the clock.

Diana made a drink and left, leaving Danni to do it all. Daisy told us, “This is sensitivity I haven’t experienced before,” saying that, on a yacht, you have to have thick skin because “you’re working with bitches and serving assholes.”

They all finally went out, and Danni continued her pathetic flirting (“Nothing I do impresses you,” she said) and the editors continued their Glenn shade (cutting back to him learning sodoku in the galley by himself).

At the end of dinner, Cloyce said, “I already paid.” Wait what? Didn’t he already pay previously? He paid for drinks twice?!

And then came our cliffhanger, which apparently started with Emma talking about being unfuckable in the van, and Diana and Danni mentioning this to Daisy, who mentioned it to Emma. “What the fuck did you say to the girls in the taxi?” Daisy asked. “They came back petrified.”

I was petrified to see them talk about this while Emma sat on a club’s toilet—and then I realized she wasn’t just sitting there, but using it while talking to Daisy and being filmed. That’s the most impressive work she’s done all season.