Ephrata ‘Survivor’ recalls challenges

EPHRATA – Different scenarios keep running through Dale Wentworth’s mind.

“I still regret things that I did or didn’t do,” he said. “Should I have made more friends? Should I have talked to this person instead of that person? Should I have done this or done that?”

Wentworth, a 55-year-old recently retired Ephrata farmer, made it to week six in the fall production of CBS’ “Survivor.” There were 18 contestants. Shooting ended in July, and the final show aired in late December.

He says competing on “Survivor” was the hardest, most challenging thing he’d ever done. He rarely slept and he lost 31 pounds in 15 days, eating white rice and small sea and land creatures.

Also competing on the show was Wentworth’s daughter, Kelley, a 28-year-old marketing manager who grew up in Ephrata and now lives in Seattle.

Both say the experience has brought them closer.

“It gave me an idea how much she’d grown up, and how good a job we did raising her,” Wentworth said.

Kelley Wentworth called it a “really, really great bonding experience” and asked, “How many people can say they did this, and did it with their dad?”

Although they only competed directly against each other briefly, there are no hard feelings.

“If it would have come down to me taking Kelley out, or her taking me out, I would have given her a hug and said, ‘It’s all part of the game,’ ” Dale Wentworth said.

Wentworth said he applied for the TV show at his daughter’s urging, but it wasn’t a hard sell. He’s always been competitive, he said, and in recent years he’s been doing 15 to 20 100-mile bicycle races a year around the Northwest.

In late March CBS flew the duo to Los Angeles for four days of interviews. Wentworth said CBS officials wanted to make sure they were show material. He thinks their competitive nature came through.

The longtime “Survivor” fan said he was excited to be on the show because “I liked the challenge of it. You’re just this average, everyday person and you see if you can survive by yourself. It’s an individual game within a team.”

For 45 days in June and July, father and daughter lived and competed on beaches in Nicaragua. Wentworth said he found it hard to be part of a tribe.

“As a farmer, I’ve always worked by myself,” he said. “If something needs to be done, I do it. I don’t ask for help, and, if somebody comes up and tells me what to do, I usually tell them to go to hell.

“When you’re trying to work with a group of eight people, you have to learn to control that. I thought I did pretty good, but some of my teammates didn’t think so.”

Conditions also were not conducive to being congenial.

“They take everything away from you: no bathroom, no toilet paper, you have very few clothes, and they put you on a starvation diet with no sleep, and your true personality comes out,” he said.

Another annoyance: camera crews.

“They basically follow you 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” he said. “You can go to the bathroom by yourself and they won’t follow but, if two people go, they will follow you because they don’t want you talking strategy.”

There were 10 to 12 people operating cameras during the day, and two to three at night. Cameras were around even when contestants were sleeping. And that was hard to do.

“The shelter hurt my body,” he said. “It was just rough logs and no pads and you started losing weight and not having any muscle so it started to bruise your shoulders and hips. I’d only sleep two to three hours a night.”

Food was hard to come by. Wentworth’s tribe was given white rice but had to hunt for anything else. Into their rice went small clams, snails, hermit crabs and what Dale called sea cockroaches.

An irritation for Dale was when other tribal members didn’t do their share of the work.

“One time, I refused to talk to anybody for a couple of hours,” he said.

Wentworth said his biggest mistake in the game was “not trying to build up an alliance with the young kids as quick as I could. I was the oldest guy on the tribe by close to 25 years.”

His favorite times were the challenges. “They took your mind off everything else,” he said.

Meanwhile, back in Ephrata, Wentworth’s wife, Kathy, was spending a lot of time lying. “The cover story was that Dale was out of the country as a center-pivot irrigation consultant,” she said.

Kathy and a few other close family members knew the true story, but they had signed an agreement with CBS to keep silent.

In week five of the show, Kelley Wentworth was voted out of the tribe. Then, on week six, her father was voted off.

“That pretty much hurt,” he said. “I’d lost my chance at a million dollars.”

Still, the Wentworths got a stipend for their time, but Dale says he can’t discuss the amount. He noted, however, that the stipend goes up the longer a contestant remains in the game.

The pain of defeat was dulled by an all-expenses-paid, 25-day vacation in Costa Rica, which he enjoyed with his daughter and other tribal members who got voted off.

“We went zip-lining, mountain biking, surfing, snorkeling, white-water rafting, horseback riding and a lot of eating,” he said.

Wentworth may be ruminating about strategies gone wrong, but he’s found himself wishing for another go if CBS wanted to do a second-time-around “Survivor.”

“If my phone rang right now, I would be out this door and on an airplane tomorrow,” he said. “It would be an opportunity to correct the mistakes I made in my first game.”