Joe Jonas has come face-to-face with some pretty unexpected moments this far in his career, but getting wedged between two boats in the middle of a luxury Italian vacation was definitely not on the itinerary or bucketlist.
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The Jonas Brothers singer opened up about the frightening accident during the Sept. 23 episode of The Morgan Stewart Show, recounting how a routine transfer from a yacht to a smaller tender boat in Portofino suddenly went very wrong.
“It sounds like the bougiest problem,” Jonas acknowledged. “But it was terrifying.”
Jonas was vacationing with his girlfriend Tatiana Gabriela, as well as host Morgan Stewart and her husband, Jordan McGraw. The group had spent time aboard a yacht complete with a crew and chef before stopping at a waterfront restaurant. The catch, though, was that the restaurant required guests to use its own tender boat to get from the yacht to shore.
According to Jonas, the water was rocky as the restaurant’s crew approached the yacht. He was first in line to make the transfer, with a first mate helping him across. Unfortunately for him, a wave happened to hit right as he was crossing.
“As I take a step, I think a wave came in and it pushed the boat far out from the yacht,” Jonas recalled. “But then I slipped and fell between those two boats.”
The first mate tried to grab him — and ended up falling into the water as well.
Suddenly, Jonas was fully dressed and in the water between the yacht and the tender, with his phone still in his pocket. He surfaced and immediately realized that staying between the two vessels was not an option. His next challenge was figuring out where to go.
The people around him suggested swimming toward the yacht’s ladder, but Jonas worried about the engines at the back of the vessel. Instead, he decided to climb onto the tender.
That didn’t go so smoothly, either.
“I must have hit my shin or something… and then I fell back in,” he said.
Jonas tried again, eventually managing to roll himself onto the smaller boat while soaking wet. Stewart, who witnessed the entire ordeal, recalled just how alarming the scene looked from her perspective.
The adrenaline eventually wore off of Jonas, but not immediately.
Jonas said that it wasn’t until roughly an hour later, while sitting at the restaurant, that he fully processed what had happened.
“I finally came down from the anxiety and I looked at Tati and I was like, ‘That s— was really scary,” he recalled. “Like that really spooked me for a while.”
His thoughts then turned to his family. He said, “I also wanted to call my kids right away. I was like, ‘I just need to call them. I need to see them. I need to see their faces.'”
Jonas shares daughters Willa, 6, and Delphine, 4, with his ex-wife Sophie Turner.
The singer said the experience made him realize how quickly something as simple as a vacation trip can turn into something dangerous and drastic.
“You realize it could’ve been any of us,” he said. “It could have been really bad. It was the best outcome of a bad situation.”
His biggest takeaway from the incident was to slow down, even when the setting is about as glamorous as it gets. He notes that “life moves so fast” and it’s easy for something really bad to happen if “you don’t have your awareness about you.”
Watch the full SirisuXM podcast episode below.