Anybody see last night’s episode? The one with the man overboard? I don’t want to spoil it, but talk about great television.
I agree, it was fantastic! My wife and I have really started gettting into the show the past couple of seasons, it’s fascinating to watch the crews interact. I was really happy to see SIg’s crew pulling massive pots, at least there is some reward for the guys doing the heavy lifting.
It was amazing to see how quickly the Time bandit’s crew reacted to the man overboard. what that guy was doing putting himself in that position was incomprhensible. It was odd to see a big guy like Johnathan visibly shaking like a leaf hugging that kid, but understandable considering what he said about the last time they had to go through that.
First, as the hour ticked away, I thought Deadliest Catch would pull a cliffhanger on us, and was very pleasantly surprised they did not.
I was feeling bad for the Cornelia Marie. When the whistle blows to end the season, no one cares about broken props, so time lost is money never regained. And to get the return prank on top. It doesn’t appear Blake knew what he was going through, but the timing just sucked. (The flour prank the previous episode, though, was fantastic.)
After 36+ hours of hauling pots, the crew wasn’t excited no matter how large the pot. It’s amazing that there aren’t more accidents, given the sleep deprivation going on.
Great stuff last night.
If that pot that got lose trapped someone between it and the rim of a “sorting bin”, it would cut him in two.
They appear to be heavy as shit. I know they were sliding them across the deck when that crane line broke, but earlier in the episode, one of the crew men jumped up on one that was standing on end, and it didn’t budge. It looked like he was jumping onto a chain link fence.
If memory serves, the pots are between 700 - 800 pounds. That would have been way #379 to die on a crab boat.
Man overboard is #1.
I’ve emailed the original magazine and asked if they have a copy of the article in electronic format. If I get anything back from them I’ll post here.
Great show, although I don’t catch it as regularly as I’d like. While those guys make a lot of money, there are more important things to me than that…like having all my fingers.
Those pots are huge and look really heavy. I know I would have been really mad if I had to push them like that. By then they were just going through the motions so I am sure it did not even phase them.
$35,000 for a propeller? And did I hear right that he was also paying a thousand bucks an hour for the repair? Yoiks, that’s a lot of crab. But then, the boat itself is at least a full-share partner, since it somehow needs to be fueled and maintained. I just thought it was absurd for Phil to head off to the clinic, just to find out that his blood pressure is high. My BP would be high too if I had kids racking up my credit cards and was looking at a $45,000+ repair job complicated by the wrong part being shipped.
It was interesting they actually keep spare props around, because they could never wait to have a new one fabricated. Not exactly a stock item.
In a Washington State warehouse 3000 miles or so away isn’t quite the same as having the parts on hand. I’m actually surprised they don’t have more heavy parts like that up there due to the intensity of “time is money” during a fishing season.
I can envision some sort of gentlemen’s deal self-insurance plan where the boat owners each put in a share of the price to buy and store big-ticket parts so the repair dock doesn’t have to front the costs. When one of them needs the part, they still have to buy it, but at least they don’t have to wait for it to be made or delivered. The “insurance” part of this would be that the part is in stock and available on minutes’ notice so they can be back out making money that much faster.
I just caught the latest episode tonight, and the man overboard rescue was some of the most compelling television I’ve seen in a while. First of all, the captain of the boat who let the deck hand hang off the crab pots in the middle of rolling seas should be taken out back and shot. And it was really amazing to see how the crew of the Time Bandit reacted – they never hesitated to put their own lives on the line to save someone they’d never met. I thought Jonathan’s reaction was priceless – tough guy crab fisherman shaking like a leaf.
Good stuff!
Last night’s episode (5/1) made it seem that the crab season is over… did this just become the shortest show ever?
They’ll probably run one more King crab season episode, then Opilio crab season starts and will run for 4 or 5 more episodes.
Last night’s episode was fantastic. Capt. Hillstrand was really tortured over the guy they couldn’t save 9 years ago. And I loved the part where Capt. Colburn got in the argument with the guy at the processing plant. Lots of f-bombs on that one. And the first rule for a greenhorn - do what the Captain tells you to do. Do not do what anyone else tells you to do.
That guy reminds me of Sex Machine in “From Dusk til Dawn”.
Glad I’m not the only one who thought “Holy shit, Tom bought a crab boat”. Damn, they could be brothers.
Some good gore this season - An almost severed finger (shown in all its glory), a self inflicted stab wound captured on film, and a tooth pulling by pliers (“I think I got part of it”). Good stuff.
he doesn’t seem to get as much focus as some of the other ones, but he’s really cool. Has a good sense of business without losing the human element. Cool guy.
Agreed, he is becoming my second favorite captain quickly, but nobody geats Sig for me. I am the crew of the 'Bandit is getting some ggod crab karma from the rescue though, they are hauling some unreal numbers!
King crab season is over and the numbers tallied.
“Sex Machine” wins the Captain’s Wager. Blake’s crew gets the smallest haul, which surprised me. They really had to work to only get 100K lbs. I thought they were doing pretty good despite dumping what they thought was excess. Still, $1500/crewman would have left them about $15,000 shy of what the big boys made, but evidently their quota was only 100K lbs, the hands on a 100K quota boat just can’t make as much as the hands on a 350K quota boat.
True, Duke, but then the 350K boat is doing 3.5 times the work, and is splitting the pot more ways, and has a higher operating expense. I don’t think it evens out, but it does bring it closer.
I did feel sorry for Blake, especially as he was dumping crab. Looked like a banner year for King Crab. Too bad we won’t see him hunting for Opilio - they said he was taking the season off.