Deadliest Catch

"Of all the reality shows, “Deadliest Catch” is by far the realest; people have actually died on it."

I haven't watched but have a co-worker who raves. So here it the NT article:

Commercial Fishermen, Battling the Elements Between Commercials

By CHARLES McGRATH

UNALASKA, Alaska

DUTCH HARBOR, a fishing port in this town on a pair of islands in the middle of the Aleutians, may be the bleakest, wildest frontier left in America. There used to be a bowling alley, but it closed. So, just recently, did the worst and most dangerous of the town’s three bars. Now most of the port’s social life, and a fair amount of its business activity, takes place in the two others. One of them, the Unisea, has a sign outside that says, “If you fight on these premises, you will be 86’d for an indefinite period of time.” Inside there is a sign proclaiming “Where Fish and Drink Become One,” whatever that means.

These are not bars for amateurs or casual drinkers. Getting hammered is the whole point. When the fishermen are in town, they toss around $50s like confetti in their eagerness to be served, and at the tail end of an evening one or two might drop to their backs on the floor and do a dying-cockroach imitation, waving their feelers in the air. Others stand in the middle of the room, glassy eyed, swaying slightly, itching for someone to bump into them.

Some of these guys are also TV stars of a sort and appear on “Deadliest Catch,” a reality series that begins its fourth season on the Discovery Channel on April 15. The show is watched by some three million viewers a week, making it one of the top-rated programs on basic cable, and it’s about work, of all things — the boring, repetitive and sometimes brutal job of crab fishing in the Bering Sea. A typical episode includes monstrous waves that slosh right up on the inside of your television screen, along with scenes of slicker-clad deckhands nearly faint with exhaustion and of anxious, bleary-eyed captains cursing and chain-smoking up in the wheelhouse.

Alaskan crab is caught in baited pots that are actually the size of small apartments and weigh about 800 pounds. These are launched over the side of the boat, allowed to soak for a while and then hauled up by a crane. Until they’re wrestled down, they’re lethal, free-swinging weights. When the crab (that’s a plural as well as a singular in fishermanese) are running, the crew members work day and night, sometimes 40 hours at a stretch. They haul pots in 30-foot waves and 60-knot winds, with seas cresting over the bow or the side. In the opilio, or snow crab, season, which usually begins in January, they routinely begin the day by chopping ice off the boat for a couple of hours. Fingers are smashed, ribs get broken, men sometimes go overboard.

Of all the reality shows, “Deadliest Catch” is by far the realest; people have actually died on it. In the first season one of the featured boats, the Big Valley — top-heavy with stacked pots — wallowed and then sank, drowning all but one of its crew.

A small number of boats are featured on “Deadliest Catch” every season and turn up weekly, like characters in an episodic novel. Each of them is rigged with two fixed cameras covering the deck and a smaller “captain’s cam” in the wheelhouse, focused on the skipper. Two Discovery Channel cameramen are embedded with each crew, stalking them day and night with hand-held cameras.

All this exposure has made unlikely heroes of some of the fishermen, especially a few of the captains: Sig Hansen of the Northwestern, who has the brooding, blond appeal of an aging Norwegian rock singer; Johnathan Hillstrand of the Time Bandit, who cultivates a sort of biker look: mullet, backward baseball cap, leather USA jacket and ostrich-skin cowboy boots; and the Cornelia Marie’s skipper, Phil Harris, gravelly voiced, tattooed and irascible.

They’re recognized on the street in Las Vegas, where a lot of fishermen like to vacation; they get sacks of fan mail, including marriage proposals, and make a nice bit of change on the side selling souvenirs, including thong underwear, on their boats’ Web sites. Last fall Brandee Lecki and Roseann Sullivan, two devoted fans of “Deadliest Catch,” traveled all the way from Swartz Creek, Mich., to Dutch Harbor, just to watch the fleet sail out for the beginning of the king crab season.

Dutch Harbor is hardly a tourist destination. The airport’s runway is so short that when a plane arrives or departs, the end is sometimes blocked with a pickup, to keep the plane from crashing into traffic headed for the docks. There are three or four trees in Unalaska, which is mostly cliff, and a number of blockhouses and Quonset huts left over from World War II, when Dutch Harbor was bombed by the Japanese. The landscape is beautiful, like the high Scottish moorland, and postindustrial, with truck chassis, fuel drums, spools of wire and other assorted junk rusting on the shore because it costs too much to ferry such stuff away. Sea lions troll the harbor. Perched on lampposts and trash bins, bald eagles are as common as pigeons.

Some crab fishermen refer to their time offshore as “sea-hab,” and as Captain Hillstrand writes in “Time Bandit,” a book he and his brother (and fellow “Deadliest Catch” captain) Andy have just published with Malcolm MacPherson, “The crew who work best on deck are animals who should be dropped off at the sea buoys on the way to port.” But Dutch Harbor is actually tamer than it used to be, back when crab fishing was an unregulated free-for-all and an unlimited number of boats competed against one another.

Since 2005 the Alaskan crab fishery has been “rationalized,” or run on a quota system, and the size of the fleet has dropped to around 80 boats from more than 250. It’s much harder to get a job now; as a result the quality of the crews has improved, with fewer misfits and druggies and guys on the lam. Some captains even lead middle-class lives in the off-season, with families and McMansions in Seattle.

Another civilizing influence on Dutch Harbor has been the Discovery Channel itself. “Deadliest Catch” has become so successful that every year Original Productions, the company that films and produces the show, increases its crew and steps up its production values.

Early last October, as the boats were fitting out for the beginning of the king crab season, some 30 production people were in town, many instantly recognizable by the brand newness of their Grundens foul-weather gear. They took over almost an entire floor of the Grand Aleutian, Dutch Harbor’s one decent hotel, and they commandeered most of Unalaska’s tiny fleet of severely dinged-up rental cars.

There were filmmakers filmmaking in the bars, and filmmakers swarming over the boats, installing cameras and electronics and then trying to waterproof them with plastic bags and electrician’s tape. And — for a documentary that the Discovery Channel had commissioned about the making of “Deadliest Catch” — there were filmmakers filming the filmmakers. A chartered helicopter buzzed around for a couple of days, taking aerial pictures of the harbor and getting on everyone’s nerves.

Inevitably the Discovery Channel’s presence has led to a degree of resentment and grumbling in the bars. There are skippers who are dying to get on the show, and others who want no part of it and make a point of shunning the film crews. One Dutch Harbor resident, Jeff Whited, who calls himself a “boat proctologist” — that is, someone who goes down into the bowels of a vessel to fix an engine or a prop shaft — said, “I hate these movie stars” while working on the Northwestern, Captain Hansen’s boat.

Even among the boats’ crew members, there is divided opinion. One deckhand confided that exposure on the show had done wonders for his sex life. Another said he was waiting to meet a “Deadliest Catch” groupie and was beginning to doubt it would happen. Another, a greenhorn, or rookie, said: “The whole thing bugs me. My whole point is to make money and look to my future, not to be on TV.”

In the early days of the show it was not easy to persuade captains and crew to subject themselves to this degree of surveillance, and a lot of ambassadorial work was done by Doug Stanley, now the show’s director of photography, who spent hours hanging out in the bars and on the docks. A former Grand Canyon river guide, Mr. Stanley is a big man with a beard and a ponytail who could easily pass as a fisherman himself, but he was nevertheless threatened on a couple of occasions; witnessed some horrific bar fights, including one in which the combatants wielded hammers; and learned, as he says, that there were “certain places it was not safe to be after a certain hour.”

“There are still guys who would like to beat us up,” he said in the fall. “Just for the sport of it — because we’re members of the community now.”

Some early-season captains agreed to be on the show out of curiosity, others because they wanted to leave a record for their children and grandchildren. “There are times I’ve said I’m done, I’m done with the stupid TV show,” Captain Hansen said. “When they go away, we’re still going to be here. It’s here or flip burgers. But most of the time I’m proud of it. This gives us a chance to show our work ethic.”

Aside from a few testy moments, like Captain Hansen’s swatting away the captain’s cam a couple of seasons ago whenever he didn’t feel like being filmed, the boat crews and the cameramen have generally gotten along pretty well. They’re not all that different, it turns out, except that while at sea the cameramen make less money. (In a good year a crab fisherman can earn upward of $75,000 and the captains well into six figures.)

Like some boat crew members, many of the cameramen are adventure junkies who have filmed in places like Iraq and Ethiopia. One, Christian Skovly, even signed on last spring as a deckhand on the Time Bandit. Sooner or later everyone gets used to having a camera around, and a far bigger problem than stiffness or stage fright is that the captains now act as directors sometimes.

“Hope they got that one,” Johnathan Hillstrand said one afternoon, for example, as the Time Bandit surged through a 20-foot wave, tossing off a cascade of spray. “We want them to feel seasick in their living rooms.”

The hired chopper was zooming around the fleet, which had been dispatched out of the harbor in a kind of ceremonial parade, to get heroic overhead and broadside action shots that could be used for the show’s opening sequence. A couple of pots were launched and then fetched back, empty. Crew members clambered needlessly on the tower of stacked-up pots near the stern. Listening to the chopper’s pilot on his radio, Captain Hillstrand explained, “They’re looking for gnarly footage.”

The weather was as good as it gets during crab season: above freezing, 20-knot winds and seas that seldom got higher than 15 feet. Because the Time Bandit’s wheelhouse is aft, however, the bow was rising and plunging, and the foredeck occasionally turned into what Russell Newberry, one of the deckhands, called an “antigravity chamber,” causing you to feel air, not deck, under your feet. After enjoying the ride for a while, Eric Babisch, a new cameraman, suddenly turned gray and became seasick not in his living room but right there by the pot hauler. This was a bad sign because Mr. Babisch, who had barely left the dock, had weeks of far worse conditions ahead of him. But Mr. Newberry grinned and, bending over with a sea-gloved finger, wrote “Eric” in the spew. “Take a picture of that!” he said.

“I sometimes think we should start over and get a whole new set of boats,” said Jeff Conroy, a co-executive producer of “Deadliest Catch,” talking about how camera-savvy some of the fishermen had become. This season the show is adding two boats to the cast — the North American and the Early Dawn — but it’s also sticking with what has worked in the past.

The producers love the Time Bandit because the crew is loose and scrappy and can be counted on for comic relief. Captain Hansen of the Northwestern fascinates them because of his Ahab-like focus and relentlessness. They like Captain Harris of the Cornelia Marie because he’s earthy and excitable, and they’re warming to Keith Colburn, captain of the Wizard and new to the show last season, because he’s such a contrarian. He’s one of the few captains not born to the business — he was a ski bum who turned up in Alaska looking for adventure — and unlike most of the others, his boat, a tub, was not custom-built for the crab fishery. It’s a refitted Navy oiler from World War II. Captain Harris also pays other skippers for the right to fish their quotas, which means that to make a buck he has to catch more and be more efficient than the others.

As it happens, all the boats are family operations. Captain Hansen’s brothers, Edgar and Norman, work for him, and on the Time Bandit there’s Neal Hillstrand, brother of Johnathan and Andy. (Andy, who in the off-season trains horses at his farm in Indiana, serves as the Time Bandit skipper during opilio season, when Johnathan works on deck.) Monte Colburn, Keith’s brother, is first mate on the Wizard, and last season Captain Harris had his two sons, Josh and Jake, working for him. Josh, who is older, was technically ranked under his brother, and the producers were hoping for a flare-up of sibling rivalry. What they got instead were scenes of the old man erupting at both his offspring.

Wave porn and scenes of fisherman numb with weariness only go so far. The producers have discovered that to sustain an entire season of “Deadliest Catch” they also need themes and dramatic narratives. Last year they got lucky when the Time Bandit became trapped in the polar ice pack, and they also squeezed a lot of mileage from the greenhorn theme with the stories of young Jake Anderson on Northwestern, struggling to win his crewmates’ approval, and hapless Guy Kisielewski on Wizard, a 40-year-old former rodeo cowboy who in less than 24 hours broke under the strain of crab fishing, quit on the spot and then sulked in his bunk.

“A greenhorn is low-hanging fruit — seeing how someone reacts to this insane world,” remarked Mr. Conroy, and he said he was pleased that Wizard had hired two more for the new season. He was also looking forward to more dynastic struggle, to something like the moment last season when Edgar Hansen seemed on the edge of mutiny (“If Sig were to exercise, his heart would explode,” he complained about his brother, comfortably perched in the wheelhouse), or to some more rivalry between Johnathan and Andy Hillstrand, whose temperaments and styles are very different. Johnathan is a hell raiser while Andy, who in good weather wears a cowboy hat on deck, writes in “Time Bandit” about “learning to be a better person through horsemanship.”

Mr. Conroy and the other producers talk about looking for a story the way captains talk about fishing for crab, and they monitor the running shipboard narratives with just as much care. Every day one of the embedded cameramen calls in by satellite phone to Ethan Prochnik, a producer at Original’s studio in Los Angeles, to report what’s happening on his boat. There’s also a hot line by which the film crews can hear what’s going on elsewhere in the fleet. “What you get is pure story talk,” Mr. Conroy said. “Someone will say, you know, we’ve got a greenhorn situation developing, and another boat might say, yeah, we’ve got one too.”

On shore the producers ask questions, make suggestions. “Out there you tend to lose sight of stuff,” Mr. Conroy said. “It’s like those of us on land, we’re your second brain. We can suggest story lines. We can suggest things to look for. We’re not making anything happen, but we are focusing on things. You can’t be footage collectors. You have to be storytellers.”

For the new season, he added, he was hoping for some underwater shots (his dream is to see crab actually entering a pot) and had also installed a galley cam in one boat, to catch the crew interacting during meals. “But,” he said with a laugh, “sometimes I think what we really need is a bar cam.”

On the last October Saturday in port, when the crew of the Time Bandit traditionally celebrates Halloween by dressing up in costumes and wigs, even a bar cam would have missed the moment when Johnathan Hillstrand, realizing that he had forgotten his Silly String (for spraying in the bar), went back to the boat and fell into the harbor. He hadn’t begun drinking yet, but it’s easy, if humiliating, to fall while boarding a crab boat; there are no gangplanks, and depending on the tide, you may have to climb around a stack of pots.

The bar cam would also have missed Eddie Uwekoolani, dressed in a Spider-Man suit, pulling his skipper out of the sea. On the other hand, it might have caught Spidey a little later, scaling the two-story stone fireplace in the lobby of the Grand Aleutian Hotel, falling and wiping out a wall sconce on the way down. And it would certainly have caught him a couple of hours later at the Unisea bar, his stretchy costume then with gaping holes where eager women had grabbed at it, doing an excellent dying cockroach.

To understand what happened next you’d have to rewind and play in slow motion: Half the people at the Unisea suddenly decided to move on to Latitudes, the town’s third bar, then still open. There was no signal, not much discussion — just a collective migration. As far as fishermen can figure out, Alaskan crab behave just the same way.