http://dsc.discovery.com/fansites/deadliestcatch/deadliestcatch.html

Not all TV is bad our family favorite is Discovery's show about Bristol Bay crab fisherman, AWESOME.

I worked a Salmon boat for a summer on Bristol Bay but it does not come remotely close to the trials of life that these fisherman encounter.

Those guys have balls of steel.....huuurrrlll!

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Yes, I saw most of that series and watched them tabulate the catch.......over the very short season.

An unbelievably difficult profession, and I'm dumfounded that they go for days on end with little or no sleep.

I love that show. Looks amazingly hard.

Brings the saying "I had a bad day at work" to a new level.

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I too watched the whole series, dumbfounded at the perils of such a profession!

The show spun off the Discovery Channel's show "The 10 Most Dangerous Jobs"...Alaskan King Crab fishing (needless to say) took top honors!

I had hoped they would go one step further and produce a series detailing what REALLY goes on with "all in a day's work"...what a way to make a quick $70K!!!

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The working with lack of sleep is not much of a suprise; that is the easy part. Dealing with the icy decks and huge seas have to be a nightmare the guys I knwo that have done it say that you are in constant pain for a month after the trip from being banged on every inch of every part of your body.

How can they walk with balls that large? My family is sick of me watching that stuff, but that has got to be the most uncommon collection of determined men outside of the military.

When I was Oil King I had about 38 hrs of straight duty when we were refueling a flotilla of Spanish minesweepers in stormy weather. There could be no "oopsie!" There was only one way to do it right, safely and in a timely manner. I had to transfer 100K fuel to several small vessels while maintaining trim and maintaining fuel and water quality for our own propulsion. During the last few hours I was so tired I was freaking hallucinating in moments when I didn't have an immediate responsibility. Times like that are when you learn what the term, "shipmate" means. My shipmates took care of me so I could do my duty.

That is what I saw when that one guy went overboard. His shipmates did their duty for the newbie despite everything thrown at them. Those are the admirable qualities that any man or woman can call upon, if they have the courage. We see it most often under times of extreme duress. it is an addiction of a sort. A good sort, mostly.

B

No doubt, my personal hell would be crawling in and out of the traps 1000 times.

What makes that show so interesting to me at least, is that they can manage to stay on the ball and working well even after not sleeping for days. Icey steel decks that are covered in water with the boat piching all over are dangerious enough on their own. But throw in 800 pound traps, and hundreds of feet of line to get wrapped in.

Plus if thats not enough if you do end up in the water its so cold you will black out in about 15 minutes.

If the boat goes down and you don't get into your survival suit don't even bother with the life jacket, game over...

They get paid good at least. I bet the deckhands walk away with $70k or so, not bad for about a months work.

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well, maybe not: http://money.cnn.com/2005/08/26/pf/jobs_jeopardy/

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.............yep, not a bad deal at all..............

.............provided that you get to walk away.

I'd love to catch that show. Not to be too pedantic about it, but those guys are crabbing in the Bering Sea, not Bristol Bay, for the most part. The latter is fairly shallow and tame, the former is...well, it's neither. I plied many of the same waters as those dudes, but in boats twice as long. We regularly dragged up their f@#king pots and other assorted detritus. I lived in relative luxury, having to only stay up for a max of 32 hrs straight. Those inhuman beasts were typically up for 72 hrs straight--they're freaks, pure and simple. I miss the adrenaline rushes. National Geographic featured one of the boats I worked on back in an Oct. '92 edition of the magazine.

Z, I know two guys I work with who were up there about the same time as you. They worked as a NOAA/NMFS rep on Japanese processing ships. Is that what you were doing? They have some interesting tales to tell.

I worked as a deckhand aboard 269' - 304' factory trawlers. The most ecologically destructive and unethical fishery ever devised by man. Think of an acre-wide midwater net opening that bycatches millions of undersize juveniles, or a 250' opening that scrapes along the bottom, digging up corals, crabs, mud and anything else in its way. We were the clearcutters of the sea. About halfway through my fishing career, the feds finally figured out they needed to regulate what had been a free-for-all. (Too late, as we found out) We were required to accomodate fulltime NMFS observers on board; usually clueless fresh-faced college grads. Your acquaintances were possibly aboard foreign-owned processers that utilized small American-owned joint venture catcher boats. Those guys were the fishing equivalent of crabbers-a hardy breed. I was aboard the first American boat invited to fish in Russian waters, off Kamchatka Peninsula, near Korf.

You guys been watching this season?

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