Had he managed to last one more tribal, Dale Wentworth might have made it to the merge tonight on “Survivor: San Juan del Sur.”
“That’s the most frustrating thing,” he says from his home in eastern Washington state. “One vote, one tribal council, any challenge in the first 15 days; one win would have put me to the merge.”
But broken up about the eviction of his daughter immediately before and running on no sleep, he couldn’t quite do it, even with his threat of his bogus immunity idol.
“That vote took place on Father’s Day,” Wentworth says of his daughter’s ouster. “That was a really bad day,” he says. “Her birthday was the week before and then Kelley got voted out. For 12 to 18 hours, I was a hot mess. I was lashing out at everybody left me alone because I wasn’t a friendly guy around camp.”
Eviction seemed inevitable for Wentworth and not only because he was one of the old guys at 55 (Keith at 53 was on the same team).
“I think it might be more my location,” Wentworth says. “My daughter and I were West Coast, and everybody else was East Coast, they all live in the large cities,” he says. That, combined with the age difference – “I was close to 30 years older than anyone else on the tribe, so they all had something immediately in common that was a very tough barrier for me personally to crack.”
The whole fake idol thing was worth a shot, and on camera, at least it looked like Coyopa strongman Jon was buying it.
But now Wentworth says, “there was only a 5 percent chance that the idol was going to work.”
Mostly, the and his daughter had their game thwarted at the merge, the arbitrary scrambling that messed with all the alliances they had made on their individual tribes.
“All her alliances stayed on Hunahpu and all my alliances went to Hunahpu,” Wentworth says. They were left with people they didn’t know or hadn’t aligned with.
“The game put a twist in there that sometimes you can’t recover from,” he says. “It’s not like we’re the first ones. There have been a lot of tribe swaps that have blown things up for people before.”
One thing that was weird, though, and something he didn’t know until he watched it on TV last week, was how Hunahpu, which had gone through their bag of rice in record time, got to bargain their tarps and blankets –move that disgusted Wentworth.
“I came to play ‘Survivor,’ not ‘Let’s Make a Deal,’” he saus. “It was the ‘Romper Room’ for Hunapu. They ate three times the amount of food that we did, and they got rewarded for it!”
Sacrifice is supposed to be part of the game, he went on, saying “I would go without food for three day if you put me back on that island,”
“You’re supposed to suffer. That’s how you open up the game. If you can’t make fire, you don’t get food and water for three days,” he says. “It’s ‘Survivor’ dammit, you’re supposed to outlast!”