Captain Jason Chambers, chef Nate Post on Below Deck Down Under regional bond

Both have spent much of their adult lives criss-crossing the globe on luxury yachts - Post as a chef, Chambers as a captain - working their way around some of the most beautiful places on the planet.

But it wasn't until the cameras were rolling and they were working on a superyacht in the Whitsundays in 2021 the pair first crossed paths, when Post dropped in late to save the charter season while Chambers steered the first edition of reality series Below Deck Down Under on MY Thalassa.

It was prime COVID era in Australia, the captain had just sacked the chef and a stewardess with two charters to go, and the heat was on.

"You're actually from this area?" Captain Chambers asked Post - who was a back-up's back-up and landed on the show because the Melbourne chef couldn't cross the state borders - as he wrestled to get the galley under control after walking into a "shitfight".

"A little place called Wagga Wagga," came the response - and then the bonding began with an iconic line.

"That's where my family is from," the captain said. "Not much to do in Wagga but drink and root."

What did the Chambers family think of that when it aired?

"It's true to form - one uncle's got eight kids and the other one's got six, so say no more," the captain laughed this week.

Captain Chambers is back at the helm for the second Australian season of the reality series, which has spawned half-a-dozen spin-offs since the original Below Deck aired in the US in 2013. It follows luxury yacht captains and their crew - and their drama-filled relationships - as they cater to the every whim of often-demanding charter guests.

New episodes are available weekly on Hayu, dropping the same day as in the US, and previous seasons also air on 7Bravo.

The only son in Raymond and Beverley's brood of three, Chambers was raised on the Central Coast but his big ties to Wagga - Chambers Place, Chambers Park, his dad started his career at ACM's The Daily Advertiser, his late uncle John co-founded printing firm Chambers and Whyte, his great-grandmother Maud Chambers was the city's first female alderman - meant much of his spare childhood time was spent in the city with his relatives. There is probably still a piece of him at Lake Albert.

"I was the only boy - I have two older sisters - so to actually go and hang out with my cousins, who I idolised, was something I couldn't get enough of," the 50-year-old said.

"We were playing Rambo or something out at Lake Albert, or hide and seek in the reeds, and I was up on top of a big willow tree and they spotted me. I went to step and stepped on a branch and slid, but I grabbed the trunk of a willow tree all the way down and it took my whole belly off, virtually. So I spent two weeks being nursed up in Auntie Pat's house with all scars on my chest and belly. Can't get that out of my head, I'll never climb a willow tree again."

The new Down Under season, based out of Cairns, premiered last week and the captain and his new crew have swapped Thalassa for Northern Sun, a converted 1977 Japanese shipping vessel now in its second life as a superyacht.

Chambers' journey to the small screen came out of the blue, through a friend. After playing top level rugby league with Newcastle Knights, adding mechanic and plumbing trades to his CV, and getting sidetracked on the way to play football in England, he joined boat life in the engine room.

He never ended up back on the footy field that trip, instead turning to plumbing in the UK after hitchhiking around South America for a year. It was through connections in England Chambers ended up walking along a dock in Newport in America in 1999.

"I ended up walking past the boat, they needed a hand, I ended up giving them a hand - I wanted to get into the engine room because that was my background - and they took me off to the Caribbean and I did my first season [there] and never looked back," he said.

At 28, he became a captain.

"The owner asked me to be their captain and told him I didn't know how to drive - and they said 'learn'," he said.

"So I took the boat to the Mediterranean and did my first season on a 35m yacht, not knowing what to do."

On returning to Australia, Chambers worked for the owner of Westfield for eight years. When the team behind Below Deck came calling, he thought it was his mate was pulling a prank.

"I told him to go away in not so - in different words - I thought it was just him on the message [and] I think they liked that attitude and said 'we really want to talk to you' - I'd just used two words to him, thought he was taking the piss," he said.

The show had been laughed at by yachties over the years, but there has been a real shift in its reception in the industry in the last five, Chambers said. It's also opened eyes to careers that people may not have even really known existed, or where they could even start to get into it.

Now based on the Gold Coast, Post was in Wagga in recent weeks for a quick trip "to catch up with my nan" - Nola Post - see mates with growing families and introduce his girlfriend of eight months Irina Mueller to his hometown and the place where his career in the kitchen began.

After wrapping up his HSC at Mount Austin High School with a VET hospitality course under his belt, the youngest of Ian and Carol Post's four children had no idea what he was going to do next.

"I started off in Wagga at Pizza Hut," the 36-year-old said.

"I worked in a call centre when I finished [school], at Salmat, and I didn't really enjoy it."

All he did know was that he wanted to see the world.

"That's the whole reason I got into cheffing really," he said.

"I had a conversation with a chef at La Porchetta - I worked there briefly after school - and he sat me down and said 'what do you want to do?'

"I said I want to travel and he said 'well just be a chef mate, because everyone needs food and everyone needs someone to cook for them'."

It was enough to kick the young man into an apprenticeship, starting at the Pavilion in Kincaid Street before moving up to Airlie Beach and completing the qualification.

Post's mates working on the water had plenty to say and although keen to get onto the white boats, he ended up working on land for a while, in hotels and restaurants, and down in Melbourne. When the time came to get to sea, there wasn't much in the way of preparation.

"Out of the blue, my old housemate called me up and said 'I've got a job for you on a yacht crossing from Florida to Italy - it starts next week'," he said.

A flight to the US and a quick safety course later, and the future had arrived. It's turned into a chef's dream.

"I was on the open waters from [about] eight days after, on a two-week crossing over to Italy," he said.

"It just flourished from there. It's a massive perk to have no budget and to be able to experiment with the best produce in the world, like buying white truffles - they're 4000 Euro a kilo and you can just go buy them easily - and getting the best lobsters in the Med. It's a real treat because normally you're working with a pretty strict budget in a restaurant."

When Below Deck came calling, it was a similarly-paced introduction as Captain Chambers delivered his troublesome chef Ryan his marching orders with two charters and four episodes to go.

"They only gave me three or four days' notice [so I went in] there pretty unprepared, I didn't know what the situation was going to be like," Post said.

"I went in and it was yeah, a bit of a shitfight. Like the worst experience going into a yacht.

"Going onto a boat and then having to clean up all that stuff, and having provisions come and then having charter guests coming, all under four hours, it was just mental. And having all the cameras on me the whole time, it was an insane experience."

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The Wagga factor kicked in quickly and the chef and the captain remain in regular contact. They missed each other in their recent visits to the city but both managed to drop into Uneke for their caffeine hits.

"We gravitated towards that, we actually have similar friends so got to know him very quickly - I wish he was there earlier," Chambers said of Post's arrival.

"Very pleasant crew member, happy, smiley - would've definitely suited the calibre of crew that I like in my environment."

The pandemic hindered the captain from making changes "that I probably would have made" during the season, including getting Post on board sooner.

"If I found him earlier, I would have had him on as well," Chambers said.

"But, you know, my hands were tied."

The rest of the crew had weeks to get used to the cameras, but for Post it was over almost before he knew it. He'd do it again, but ruled himself out for this season due to commitments - he was locked into a job in Mexico and has been working on a boat owned by a Go Pro boss since - and reckons the synergy he developed with returning chief stewardess Aesha Scott might have jinxed it for him anyway.

"The last two charters, their preferences were just pretty crazy and I wasn't getting much sleep because I had so much prep work to do and so much to think about when it came to that ... it was just an intense eight days," he said.

"Whether I was in line or not for the next season... I don't think I would've been because me and Aesha got along so well, there wouldn't have been enough drama for the show. They need to find that somewhere and the chef and chief stew is one of the main places where you find it."

In another Riverina twist, two of the guests who boarded Post's first Below Deck charter are overheard mentioning they met at Burning Seed - the festival held each year in the Matong State Forest.

It's a long way from Wagga, and nothing like what he could have pictured walking out of the school gates on his last day.

"I'm really happy it turned out this way because I've been all over the world and got to experience in a really good way, you know, not like just slumming it," Post said.

There are only ever up to 12 guests on board - after that point, it's a different vessel classification - but in yachting, size matters. Eleven years later, Post has worked out what he likes: a boat around the 50, 55m mark.

"You have about 12 to 13 crew, which is a really nice number," he said.

"If you work on a boat that's say 90 metres, you've got about 45 crew and people are coming in and out all the time."

Chambers has worked all over the world by gravitates towards Asia and the Pacific. It was a conscious decision to come back to the southern hemisphere and he and Post both share a love of Papua New Guinea.

"I've done a lot of Australia, up around the Kimberley, and I've done a hell of a lot of Indonesia, Thailand and Papua New Guinea," he said.

"Some of the best things I've ever done was working for some American owners and going up into PNG. In our time off, we used to give a lot back to the villagers - installed solar panels in hospitals, water tanks and plumbing, in run-down hospitals that were deserted by Australia in 1968.

"We'd do as much as we could while we were there and it put a whole new, different perspective into how to spend someone else's money."

Chambers' shift to Below Deck is part of a plan to spend more time with his daughter, almost nine-year-old Saskia, who recently moved to Bali from the Philippines - where the co-parents still have a little resort they built when they moved from Australia - with her mother.

"If I'm not doing Below Deck, I'll be working on boats... you're virtually full-time, you might have three months off a year as you're on the boat full-time, you don't have much of a home life [and] it's long hours away from family and friends," he said.

"I didn't see my daughter for a year and a half during COVID, I couldn't get to the Philippines, so [doing] Below Deck allowed me to take some time off with my daughter and now I'm changing my work to suit me now rather than it to suit it."

His parents moved back to Wagga nine years ago to rejoin the Chambers siblings in their twilight years - and yachting's nomadic lifestyle means Jason's official address is in Boorooma - and thanks to the show are getting to see more of what their son has been up to for the last two-plus decades working literally over seas.

"Probably the best thing that's come out of it is my parents can finally see what I do for a job," he said.

"They have got to see their son work and that's probably the best gift I've ever given them.

"[My dad] has given me the ability to just know that you can just do whatever you want, really, just go for it. He's just such a humble guy."