‘Deadliest Catch’ Sneak Peek: ‘Fire at Sea: Part 2′
Deadliest Catch fans, the wait is over. After watching the Northwestern go dark at the end of the June 21 episode, thanks to an electrical fire in the engine room, it's finally time to see how Capt. Sig Hansen and his crew, led by his brother Edgar Hansen, respond.
As you can see in the exclusive sneak peek from tonight’s episode, “Fire at Sea: Part 2,” they first have to assess the situation. “When we ran out of power, in my mind, I thought it was water in the fuel. I thought we needed to change the filters. It was like, ‘Holy cow, I’m a dead ship,’” the captain tells Yahoo TV. “Then you find out it was a fire, and that's what shut us down. If I remember it, I was lying to myself the whole time. ‘Just stay calm, stay calm.’ Which is a lie, because you’re not. We were really lucky that all the guys were out on deck at that time, because they could respond so quickly.”
The fire, they believe, was caused by a faulty breaker that stuck when it should have flipped. Once the smoke cleared, another worry emerged. “The crab pumps are what holds the water in the tanks, either full or empty. My biggest concern was getting power to these pumps, because if you have a slack tank — with water rushing from one side to the other — that’s how boats [list and] sink,” Hansen says. “Edgar did a fantastic job by jury-rigging a bunch of breakers together so that we could get power back to the [pumps] and get power to our steering. We were steering by hand for, I don’t know, hours in the dark.”
They were able to return to Dutch Harbor, Alaska, and spent well over a week there for repairs. “We redid the panel. It’s twice the size,” Sig says. “Boats were never intended for all the equipment that they have today. It’s pretty impressive, what they have today vs. what they were built for. The panel’s part of the deal: It’s got to be bigger.”
We know the Northwestern continued fishing, because Sig was in the wheelhouse when he suffered his heart attack earlier this year — which is yet to come on the show this season. “I suppose it was stressful,” Sig says of the fire. “You don’t think about it till after, but yeah, I was kind of angry.”
Still, he considers himself lucky. “My dad, when he had a fire on the Foremost [the family boat before the Northwestern], it was a wooden boat. They managed to get into the lifeboats, and they were just, I don’t know, maybe 20 yards away from the boat, and it blew up, because it was a gasoline engine. When it blew, they could see the bottom of the hull — the boat blew out of the water. That’s the thing about a fire. They’re a scary thing, because what are you going to do? Where are you going to go? So we were lucky that they were able to contain it right away.”
Deadliest Catch airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. on Discovery.