Valor’s chief stew also fills ET in on the status of her love life and the romance still to come this season on the show.
Kate Chastain really was ready to run away from Below Deck -- with “Hot Jesus” -- in the middle of the season!
“He sailed away to Guadalupe,” Kate tells ET of her Caribbean lover featured on season five of the Bravo hit. “He kept saying, 'I'm leaving for Guadalupe. Come with me.' And I was so frustrated with how green the crew was, and he was actually very smart -- he has his doctorate in engineering and just didn't want to be part of the rat race, so he started sailing, this beautiful sailboat. Pretty good.”
“I looked for my passport,” she continues. "They locked my passport in a safe so I couldn't run away! Otherwise, I would be in Guadalupe, maybe … and next day, [his] boat was gone.”
Kate says we won’t see anymore Hot Jesus hookups this season, but there is some unexpected romance to come... between the crew.
“There's a little romance,” she teases. “Actually, there's two romances [and] you will never guess who.”
As for her own love life, the 34-year-old says she has “slim pickings” back home in Florida.
“It's like retirees,” she shares. “[And] I don't trust my judgment. If I'm attracted to you, I'm probably going to run … I'm still going through that rebel phase.”
“I really should just date an accountant,” she admits. “Safe Doug, Doug in accounting.”
One thing Kate knows for sure, she’s only interested in men from here on out.
“I checked that box,” she says of dating a woman. “It's like, in yachting sometimes, you visit a country you haven't traveled to, and then when you depart you're like, 'Well, I don't need to go back there’ ... I came, I saw, I conquered, I left.”
Her last long-term relationship was with a woman, pro soccer player Ro Hernandez, but it ended when Kate was arrested for domestic violence in June 2016.
“The charges have been dropped and I'm allowed to talk freely about it later,” she shares. “So, right now, I'm agreeing to not talk about it until about March. But then, come March, I am really ready to talk freely about it. A lot of people are like, ‘Are you sure you want to revisit that?’ Well, yeah. If you feel like you never got your chance to say, you know, something. So, I can't decide yet. I'm gonna see how I feel in March.”
For now, she’s just focused on her career -- though she does admit she’ll be ready to settle down sooner rather than later.
“I only meant to do [yachting] for a year after college,” she says. “I ended up loving it, [but] I'm phasing it out. I mean, I've got a dog now … it was so exciting for me to travel. But now what's exciting for me is, like, potted plants. And throw pillows.”
“I can't be around humans breathing all the time! I want space,” she continues. “I want to decorate.”
Still, Kate will always answer the call when Captain Lee -- her Below Deck co-star -- calls.
“I feel really lucky that, you know, for six weeks, I get to escape reality and go work for Captain Lee and make a bunch of money,” she admits. “It's kind of a nice balance … [I’m down to] one charter season a year and that's all. I'm spoiled working for Captain Lee at this point.”
Below Deck airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET on Bravo. For more Bravo goodness, check out our chat with Real Housewives of Dallas star LeeAnne Locken below.