Satellite Beach's Ashley Nolan recalls her 'Survivor' experience

Brian McCallum
Florida Today

Forbidden from speaking even a word to her "Survivor" cast mates for about a week while they waited in a hotel to be stranded on an island for up to 39 days, Ashley Nolan did the one thing show producers encouraged her to do most.

She ate.

And she ate, and she ate. But days into a hotel stay awaiting filming of the CBS reality show, the Satellite Beach resident made a decision she came to regret.

"I'm like, man, we're gonna go out there any day now. I'm gonna be in a bathing suit. I should just eat light today, so at breakfast that morning, I just had some fruit or whatever."

Then came the word. It was time to be stranded. She and her tribe mates soon would share only a bag of rice and whatever they could find or catch on their own.

"The entire rest of the time I was out there, I was thinking of the pancakes I should have eaten that morning, like the whole rest of the time," Nolan said.

That's Survivor, days of uncertainty spent making million-dollar decisions while enduring starvation, fatigue and conflict. It's an experience fellow Satellite Beach resident Sebastian Noel, a former Viera High football player, experienced last summer. Noel is on the current season, Survivor: Ghost Island, airing on CBS each Wednesday.

"There's really no way to prepare for that (hunger) feeling on top of all the other stress of not sleeping and keeping up with the game play and being able to perform physically and being up and active at camp and being helpful," Nolan said. "There's no way to really explain it other than to experience it."

That was what Nolan wanted: to be cast on the show that strands up to 20 strangers with almost no food, regularly pits them against each other in physical and mental contests and then forces them to vote one of the losers out of the game.

Survivor, the CBS reality show that debuted in 2000, cast the 26-year-old Nolan for its 35th season, "Heroes vs. Healers vs. Hustlers." A Brevard County Ocean Rescue lifeguard captain at the time, Nolan was assigned to the Heroes tribe. She survived a second-day-of-shooting confrontation with a tribe mate that made her an early target for elimination votes and went on to survive 36 of 39 days.

She was the 13th voted out of a cast of 18. One of her original tribe mates, Ben Driebergen of Boise, Idaho, was the sole survivor and won $1,000,000.

Nolan survived the first 12 cuts on her athleticism and ability to make friends.

"You go out there and think, 'O.K., I'm gonna be really good at this,' but then you get out there and you're like, that's what all these people think. That's why we're all here."

As a Satellite High student — she graduated in 2009 — Nolan played volleyball and, for a season, softball. She then spent a year on the volleyball team for Eastern Florida State before getting the opportunity to play in what was then the Lingerie Football League.

She jumped at that like she jumped at Survivor.

"If the opportunity's there, I'll take it," she said. "That's kind of how I've always done everything."

It was deciding what opportunities to take or perhaps create that became a turning point for her on the show while trying to become one of the final three.

"Do I make some huge, bold, epic move so that when I'm in the final three, they vote for me, or do I dumb it down a little bit so that I just get to the final three? Is that good enough, or do you want to go big? I think that's the struggle everyone gets to."

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Nolan said she found the in-between and finished sixth. Now, she's open to whatever opportunities may arrive.

While she hasn't been seeking a movie or television career, she was an extra as a lifeguard in the remake of "Baywatch," and Nolan would do Survivor again "in a heartbeat" or other shows, such as "Amazing Race."

But next time, as filming approaches, she'd have the pancakes every morning. It's exactly what she did after being voted out of Survivor.

"My very first request, the next morning, was pancakes," she said, "and then I was hooked on pancakes for, like, the next two weeks. Even once I got home, I was so excited to make my niece and nephew pancakes for breakfast."

Yet, there were times stranded on that South Pacific island when Nolan and her Survivor tribe mates talked about whether they'd do it all again. Some, in the midst of the fatigue and hunger, wished they hadn't done it in the first place.

But then, a little food from a reward provided new energy and a new attitude.

"It's funny how quickly you kind of forget the bad stuff and remember the good stuff," she said. "Yeah, I would do it again for sure."

Contact McCallum at 321-242-3698 or bmccallum@floridatoday.com. Follow @Brian_McCallum on Twitter.

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