Below Deck Fans Say Jess' Love Triangle is Sinking Season 12 — and the Crew is Over It

Below Deck Season 12 just dropped its wildest episode yet.

Below Deck season 12 just threw another wrench into the works, and this one isn’t a minor oops. Jess had a rough night in episode 13, made a couple of high-stakes mistakes, and it left the whole crew on edge. And yes, the on-boat love triangle might be part of it — but that’s not the whole story.

What actually went wrong

By the end of the night, Captain Kerry asked Jess to "prep the anchor." That’s standard end-of-day stuff. Instead, she started dropping it. If you watch this show, you know that’s a very different command. That moment spiraled into more slip-ups and ended with Jess in tears.

Captain Kerry pulled her aside, checked in on her headspace, and made it clear this can’t happen again. Jess owned it and said she was in her own head — distracted, basically.

The love triangle theory

Jess’s boss, Bosun Hugo Ortega, has a different read. He thinks the boatmance drama — Jess juggling flirtations with stewardesses Bárbara Kulaif and Solène Favreau — is bleeding into her work. And he didn’t exactly whisper it.

"To be honest, I'm concerned about Jess's performance... I 100 percent know that something's distracting her."

"It doesn't help that she's having all these relationships going on in the boat, and it's starting to bleed into work. I'm really worried about where this is going to go."

Inside baseball, but true: on Below Deck, romances rarely stay on the dock. That said, there’s more going on here than just crushes and crossed wires.

The other pressure point

After another misstep, Jess crossed paths with Captain Kerry again and opened up about something heavier: the primary charter guest’s health situation.

"I think with the whole guest and the chemo thing, it's kind of hitting home a little."

"I think with the charter guest, given the cancer, it really hits home."

Kerry told her to step back and clear her head — the sane move when someone is clearly overloaded.

Where this leaves Jess

Put simply: she’s rattled. Some of it looks like classic Below Deck boat-romance chaos, but the charter guest’s cancer is clearly weighing on her too. The show tees up next week to dig into whether Jess can reset before the boat — literally — drifts into more trouble.