After living much of his life at sea, Captain Sandy finds love on land

Sandy Yawn from 'Below Deck Mediterranean' married Leah Shafer for – what else? — a superyacht in Florida.

Sandra Dolores Yawn was locked up, left for dead on a Florida highway and pursued across the Red Sea by pirates.

< p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">In the summer of 2018, Leah Rae Shafer reached out to Facebook to send her blessings to Ms. Yawn. Not because she thought Ms. Yawn, nicknamed Captain Sandy, needed his best wishes, but because she had started watching "Below Deck Mediterranean" on Bravo.

The show follows a crew tasked with looking after a rotating group of guests who have chartered a superyacht. Ms. Yawn, a star of the series, is in charge. Ms. Shafer had written to her to congratulate her on the success of the show. There was also another reason. “I thought she was hot,” she said.

Mrs. Yawn, 59, has been a yacht captain for more than 30 years. His foray into television, which began in 2017, wasn't exactly predetermined. Until my mid-20s, “I was a mess,” Ms. Yawn said. “I was always in trouble. I was kicked out of 11th grade. I didn't go to university. At 13, at the start of an adolescence spent between Dundee, Florida, where her father lived, and Bradenton, Florida, where her mother lived, she started drinking. At 17, “I was arrested so many times I couldn’t even count how many,” she said. Usually it was a parent who bailed her out. Her father's refusal to do so after a drunken incident landed him a night in prison.

In 1989, when she was 25, the door rotating treatment centers in South Florida that she had I tried to stop rotating when a counselor told her she couldn't return. "She said, 'Sandy, as soon as you have some money in your pocket, you're going to start drinking again,'" Ms. Yawn said.

ImageFifty-five guests, the maximum allowed on board the She's a 10 Too, were present. Credit...Kelly Martucci

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