'Deadliest Catch': 10 Things We Learned From Sig Hansen and Sean Dwyer
Deadliest Catch returns tonight for its 12th season on Discovery, and while veteran captain Sig Hansen and newbie Sean Dwyer are making the media rounds, they stopped by Yahoo TV on Monday for a Facebook Live chat. You can watch the full conversation below (complete with the occasional salty language and NSFW hand gesture).
Here are some highlights:
1. Why Hansen farmed out his Bairdi quota to 23-year-old Dwyer — whose goal was to get the boat his late father bought, the Brenna A, out crabbing: “I gave him the crab, honestly, because I wanted it caught and I didn’t want to take any risk by doing it myself because of the time frame we had [with King and Opies]. So I figured if you got a guy that’s young and hungry, he’ll kill himself tryin’,” Hansen says. “Contractually, we did it so that crab had to be caught. So I basically used him, is what I did. Because when you’re leasing crab back and forth, a lot of people don’t understand, let’s say he got my crab, and then all the sudden somebody [else] jumps in, ‘Hey, I got some quota that you can have,' or maybe it’s a different species. What happens is, all the sudden priorities change and maybe he wouldn’t have [been] dedicated to mine — it would have gone down the list. So I wanted to make sure that that was top priority, and then other crab would come into play later, if he got lucky.”
Dwyer, who was getting the Brenna A ready to hopefully fish Opies, ended up having to get her to the Bering Sea three months earlier than expected once he got the surprise call from Sig. “To get the boat fishing, somebody has to give you crab, somebody has to give you a shot. [Usually] somebody has to mess up or lose quota, so that you can gain it. So it’s really tough, and being a young guy with no reputation...,” Dwyer says. “My dad’s was his; I have to make my own reputation. It was a big deal, but it was important to me because it was something we always wanted to get done. So when the time came, no matter if it was Bairdi or whatever crab, I’ll catch it.”
“Because Bairdi is not the most attractive thing to go out and fish, once you do that and that’s all you’re doin’, people are gonna hear about it, and then you have better odds to gain more later,” Hansen says. “That’s exactly what I told him: ‘You’re building a reputation, whether you know it or not. You don’t have to start up on the top, you just have to be that guy.’”
Hansen gave Dwyer, who’s fished crab before but not with a camera crew, more advice on how to handle that side of the job. “[Normally] you wake up, you haul gear, you go to bed. You’re a Bering Sea robot,” Dwyer says. “Now you gotta talk and you gotta think about stories, and there’s more people on board. He gave me some good advice there, and it was mainly just to be honest. ‘Cause if you go out there and you try to act, eventually you’re gonna get tired. There’s nowhere to go, you can’t just go to your room and think about what you’re gonna say, you just gotta say it.”
Or as Hansen puts it, “Be yourself. If they don’t like it, they can kiss your a--.”
2. Sig and Saga captain Jake Anderson will tangle again. You’ll see some serious pranking in the season premiere. As for where their relationship stands this season, “I think I gave Jake a pretty good leg-up. I think he’s in that time where he needs to start doin’ it for himself. So I was a little more reserved with Mr. Anderson this year,” Hansen says. As for Dwyer, he admits he doesn’t have a captaining “style” yet. His inexperienced crew wasn’t able to read between the lines, so he had to explain more things than he was expecting to. “I was trying to keep my distance because that’s the style that I liked to work for, but I had to become a little bit more involved,” Dwyer says.
“Your style changes with the crew,” Hansen explains. “So get a good one.”
“That’s the hardest part about that job,” Dwyer admits, adding that he’d only worked with one member of his crew before. He hired a friend to be his greenhorn.
“Don’t hire your friends. It’s like Take Your Daughter to Work Day,” Hansen says, with a wink.
3. Sig’s daughter, Mandy, is back on deck for part of the season. “She plays a different role this season, so it was more of an educational experience,” Hansen says. “I think she got to see me in the wheelhouse in a different light, and I got to see her in a different light. So that was nice. She wants to be on deck and she wants to work and use her hands, but as she goes through this progression of getting her third mate unlimited license, she has to get these experiences as well. So that was a good thing.”
4. Mandy isn’t on board when Sig has his heart attack, but she is on board when there’s a fire in the Northwestern’s engine room. Fire is Sig’s biggest fear as a captain. It doesn’t help that he's not the best swimmer. “I can swim, just not very far. I mean, I can kind of tread water... sorta,” Hansen says. “When we were in Hawaii, my wife actually saved my life. She was telling us that story this morning. I was turning blue, man, and she rescued me... Maybe I just need to work out more and have a little more energy... You can’t swim drunk, maybe that’s the problem. I’m kidding!”
5. More than one storm hits the fleet this season, one of which has waves that bend the bow of the Northwestern. “It’s no fun,” Dwyer says of being stuck in a storm. “You just gotta wait. It might last 24 hours, it might last eight [hours], it might last three days. You just wait and try to make it safe, get the guys off-deck in time, make sure everything’s tied down.” Here’s how Hansen would describe what it feels like: “I got an idea: why don’t you hop into your car, find a four or five-story building, because that’s about as big as the waves are, and then the winds blowing 50 or 60 or something. So drive your car into the building and tell me how you feel. Because that’s pretty much what you’re doing,” he says. “Only it’s building after building after building after building. It’s just constant pounding like that.”
Because of El Nino bringing warmer waters, there’s not as much ice during Opies this season, which is different. Recalling his scariest experience with ice, Hansen goes back to a couple decades ago. “We iced up so bad that she was sinking under our feet. It took us 18 hours to get the ice off, so she was on her side,” he says. “So I guess a bit of advice [to Sean] would be if you’re on fishing, you sometimes have to stop to break the ice off the boat. I think I was 28 at the time — didn’t want to stop. It’s a big mistake. So don’t forget to break the ice. It’s scary. Because the surface area gets bigger and bigger, so as the ice builds, your surface area increases, and then pretty soon it’s just like a snowball... so you can’t stop it. Then you get to that point where, ‘Oh, what did I do? Oops.’”
6. Sig has caught some weird things in his day. He caught a workout bike once, and a toilet. “Johnathan [Hillstrand] stuck an alligator or crocodile head in the back of our pot — I don’t even know if it played on the show. It was a prank,” Hansen says laughing. “We’re like, ‘There’s no crocodiles! We’re in the Bering Sea!’ And then [deckhand] Matt Bradley was gonna take it to some museum and find out what species of prehistoric alligator he had found on the back of a pot. Damn you, Hillstrand!”
7. Sig doesn’t expect to retire anytime soon. “Do I look freakin’ dead to you? No. I think it’ll be a while. I just don’t want to give [my brother] Edgar the satisfaction of taking the boat. As long as I can hold out,” he says laughing again. “I like what I do. I wouldn’t do anything else. But it’s getting harder in the winter months. It does get harder.”
Does he ever see Edgar taking over, really? “Not really. Not dead yet,” he says again. “Edgar took the boat over [this season]. You gotta watch. ... Why does Edgar always get the pity card? What the hell?! They treat him like a freakin’ baby! Stop it! He’s a grown freakin’ man. ‘Oh, you’re mean to your brother.’ Come on!”
8. Sean’s crew has some learning to do... when it comes to drinking. A lot of deckhands like to blow off steam in town when they return from a successful trip with money in their pockets. “I don’t let them go if there’s crab on the boat. For the last trip, they kept pushing back our off-load. So the day before we flew out, they had some time and they were allowed to go out, and we all went and had lunch. I think we went to the restaurant at, like, 3 p.m., and by 5 p.m., every one of them was back in the boat passed out,” Dwyer says. “It was like $1,300.”
“Two hours of drinking, and they passed out?” Hansen asks.
“Yeah, at their seats they were passing out,” Dwyer says.
“Light weights,” Hansen scoffs. “My god. ... My dad used to call them the Pepsi Generation, bunch of new babies.”
9. Sig believes he’s seen UFOs. “I don’t care what people say, I’ve seen them. Not the ones that Johnathan pranked me on. We took the boat from Alaska to Seattle, it takes about six or seven days. And light was just following [us], come back and just hover. No, it wasn’t a helicopter. They’re out there,” he says.
Dwyer sounds skeptical: “We hired a guy at Dutch one year because we needed a fill-in, and I was on whale watch, and he was relieving me,” he says. “He came up and told me all about how these drones were following him, and there’s spacecraft and stuff. I don’t know. It was a little weird.”
Hansen’s response to that? “Stop hiring stoners.”
10. Sig also thinks he’s seen a mermaid. Then again, he admits you can get a little loopy when you’re out to sea for months at a time. “We used to be able to off-load at sea. Even if you fished for two weeks or 10 days, you would deliver at sea and then go straight out. That went on for months,” he says. “The most I’ve done is, we went up there in December or January and we got the boat back in, I think, September. A long time, just in one stretch. We used to fish Opies in the summer. Now the scientists won’t let you do that.”
Deadliest Catch Season 12 premieres March 29 at 9 p.m. on Discovery.
