King sailing on wave of fame thanks to Bravo’s ‘Below Deck’
You wouldn’t know it from watching “Below Deck Sailing Yacht,” but Gary King likes to have space to himself.
Before he starts the summer charter season, he likes to book a hotel room for a few days.
“If I can have my own space, and just relax a little bit, it makes the season a lot easier,” says the 33-yearold via video chat from a hotel room in the island of Sardinia he has booked for precisely this purpose.
King, who is from South Africa, has just finished a day of work aboard Parsifal III, the 177-foot sailing yacht that provides a setting for some of the most outrageous antics in the Bravo universe.
Each show in the dangerously habit-forming “Below Deck” franchise follows the hard-partying crew members and demanding guests aboard yachts in exotic destinations around the world, from the Caribbean to the South Pacific.
Now in its third season, “Sailing Yacht” is arguably the most dramatic incarnation of “Below Deck,” thanks to tighter living quarters, wind-tossed working conditions and adventure-hungry crew members.
King, who joined “Sailing Yacht” in its second season, has become the show’s breakout star, a mischievous charmer with a tousled man bun and a husky smoker’s voice who is almost bafflingly irresistible to his female co-workers. (King has hooked up with nearly all the women in the Parsifal III crew as they sailed the Balearic Islands of Spain this season, but his abundant chemistry with plucky chief steward Daisy Kelliher is what has viewers in
a frenzy.)
In other words, King makes for great TV. But he also happens to be very good at his other job, as the Parsifal’s first mate; this season viewers saw King spring into action when the yacht nearly ran aground during an early morning wind storm.
King has always gravitated to the water. Growing up in Knysna, a city in South Africa known for its large lagoon, he’d often hitchhike to the beach after school.
“My mom would come and pick me up after work. I’d see her sitting in a car when it was getting dark flashing her lights at me,” he recalls.
He became a “yachtie” by accident. During a gap year in Majorca, Spain, he learned quickly the South African rand doesn’t go very far in Europe. Unwilling to ask his mom, a single parent, for money, he decided to go “dock-walking.”
“It’s the most demoralizing thing in the world,”
he says. “You go from one boat to another: ‘Hi, do you have work for me?’ ‘No.’ ‘Hi, do you have work for me?’ ‘No.’ ”
Eventually, he got a job on Creole, “a lovely old classic schooner built in 1927,” and he hasn’t looked back since. “I kept getting paid to travel, and I was making good money. Here I am, 12 years later.”
King says the hardest part of yachtie life is being a hemisphere away from his family: His mom is in South Africa, his brother in New Zealand.
The job also makes it hard to settle down — something King swears he wants to do sooner rather than later.
Mostly, though, he’s eager to film more “Sailing Yacht,” should the executives at Bravo decide to bring him back for another sail. The network has not yet made any announcements about a fourth season; King says he didn’t get the call about season three until a few weeks before it began filming.