Why the 'Deadliest Catch' captains think the show has made it to 200 episodes (and it's not just the Coast Guard rescues)

Deadliest Catch is back tonight for the premiere of its 14th season — and 200th episode — and Yahoo Entertainment has your first look at the Northwestern, Wizard, Saga, Summer Bay, and Brenna A leaving Dutch Harbor, Alaska, for the king crab grounds.

As you see in the sneak peek, Jake Anderson and Sig Hansen weren’t exactly talking at that moment. Sig had tossed Jake out of the Northwestern wheelhouse when he dropped by looking to partner with his mentor. After the Saga‘s expensive $750,000 makeover, Jake needs to put crab in the tank, but he’ll have to rely on a 6-month-old government survey to find them.

The two men were, however, talking when they stopped by Build Series NYC for an interview with us on Monday. And it’s no surprise: Asked to name the moment that’s made him the happiest in the show’s run, Jake said it was when he got his jacket on Hansen’s family-run Northwestern. “There was a lot more going on than just gettin’ a jacket. It was where I had just came from, just having struggles in my own life, and then when the guys on the Northwestern basically made me a part of something that was huge to me that I never thought I could achieve,” he said. “So becoming a captain and all that has been great … but the biggest moment I think, the most significant moment, was what that jacket signified for me as a person.”

Sig Hansen, Keith Colburn, Jake Anderson, Josh Harris, and Wild Bill Wichrowski (Photo: Noam Galai/BUILD Series NYC)

The idea of family was on the minds of the other captains as well: Hansen said his moment was seeing the footage of his loved ones gathered around him after his 2016 heart attack. For Keith Colburn, it was fishing with his son. Josh Harris, who’s basically lived his whole adult life on the show, said it was knowing that his child could someday watch both him and his father, the late great Capt. Phil Harris, on the series (and that cameras had captured his final conversation with his dad). Wild Bill Wichrowski thought of all the little moments that add up to his crew doing something “epic” — and joked that if he ever has great great grandkids, they’ll say he was “kind of an a**” but he’s prepared for it.

The captains were also asked why they think the show remains so popular, 14 seasons in. Colburn often hears it’s one of the only shows a whole family can agree on watching together, and people are always telling Wichrowski they wish they could experience that kind of adventure for just one day. Josh’s answer went beyond the fact that people are curious about the life-and-death danger on deck. “[People] deal with a lot of the problems that we deal with, because you get to see a lot of our home life,” he said. “It’s like with me, personally, my brother who abused drugs, out of control, and losing a family member where now we gotta take over the business. People get to watch all this stuff ’cause they’re going through similar things, and how do you cope with all this: is there a right way, is there a wrong way? They think we have a lot of these answers because you get to see me do it and watch me fail miserably or you get to see me succeed. A lot of people can relate to all that.”

Anderson may have summed it up best: “[Like with Josh], they’ve watched me grow up and follow the American dream and accomplish that American dream. It’s not pretty, it’s ugly. There’s a lot of kickin’, and cryin’, and moanin’. And that’s just one of the 50 interesting stories that are on there and they’re 100 percent authentic. And I think that’s what can draw the crowd. So I really believe in the integrity of the show, and I think I can speak for all of us that that’s what it is — you’re really watching a real documentary.”

Deadliest Catch Season 14 premieres Tuesday, April 10 at 9 p.m., following “The Bait” pre-show at 8 p.m., on Discovery. The all-new Discovery Go series Deadliest Catch: Greenhorn is streaming now.

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Man overboard, supermoon seas, and the painful new season of 'Deadliest Catch'

Fourteen seasons in to Discovery’s Emmy-winning reality series Deadliest Catch, and the captains are as spoiler-phobic as ever. But sitting down with us for a Build Series NYC interview ahead of Tuesday’s return (which is also the series’ 200th episode), they did open up about the battle we’ll see with the always brutal Bering Sea winter.

During the opilio crab (a.k.a. opi or snow crab) season, they dealt with the kind of supermoon event you only see once every 150 years. As Capt. Keith Colburn explained, what ensued was “chaos all over the planet with the currents and the tides.” It was the worst the fleet has ever seen. Opi season was “big waves and everything breakin’ ’cause of the waves,” Capt. Jake Anderson said. “It was torture for us, I know that.” (A wave hit another boat in the fleet so hard, it smashed all the windows out of the wheelhouse, they said.)

Discovery has also revealed in the Season 14 trailer that at some point, a deckhand on Capt. Wild Bill Wichrowski’s Summer Bay is pulled overboard, which sets off a feverish search (the network hasn’t disclosed the outcome). It’s the first time that’s happened in Bill’s 40-year career, and it understandably hit him hard — which the other captains attested to after spending time promoting the show with him.

“I’ve never seen him get so choked up in my life, so this is like the most serious topic you could ever touch on. And sincerely, he really took it to heart,” Capt. Sig Hansen said. “It’s about as real as you’re gonna get, I think, what he has to go through and the people that went through it.”

“You prepare for this every day as a captain, every day as a deckhand, and I’ll just give you this one little bit,” Bill said. “The incident had happened, I went, ‘No way. That didn’t happen. I just didn’t see that, did I?’ And I did.”

Even when a crew member goes into the frigid water on purpose — say, to jump on a walrus carcass or switch boats — it’s a surreal sight, Colburn and Anderson insisted. So just imagine Bill’s situation, Sig said: “This guy has a crew member that goes in the water. He knew him as a child, and now he’s responsible for him, and then Bill’s watching this guy literally dying, and you’ve only got a few minutes. It’s in the Bering Sea, what do you got? Ten minutes before hypothermia sets in and then you’re done.”

“Two [minutes], typically,” Anderson said. Because the stakes are that real, and that high, you’ll never catch him watching the show. “I can only relive that once. I can’t relive it twice. It’s hard just even talking about a lot of stuff,” he said. “And to see Bill these last couple of weeks talk about it… I’ve always grown up and he was the toughest guy we knew. And to see it break him down, it became pretty real to me, and hopefully I never go through that experience.”

Capt. Josh Harris, who returns to the wheelhouse of the Cornelia Marie this season alongside his co-captain, Casey McManus, admitted he hasn’t watched the show since his father, the late great Capt. Phil Harris, passed away. (Though maybe that will change this season, he said, since, while he’s always paying tribute to his father’s legacy, they are also making the boat more their own.) Sig remembered in Season 1 his family speeding home to watch the show together. Now, because he gets too animated watching the drama unfold, his wife has banished him to his office to watch solo.

One experience the men share is having their phones tell them how well they’re doing in any given episode. Bill noted that he tends to catch more hell from the West Coast than the East, and that he and Keith have traded off years as “the bad guy.” They wonder if it might finally be Sig’s turn in the hot seat after the trailer showed him literally tossing Anderson out of the Northwestern wheelhouse when Jake came to his mentor looking for information to help guarantee crab in his tank after a $750,000 makeover on the Saga. “Twenty years of fishin’, I’ve never been kicked out of a wheelhouse,” Jake said, able to laugh about it now.

Looking back on the confrontation that took place before king crab season in October, Hansen said it’s like, “Dude, I love you. I don’t want to hurt you. But it was like time to leave the nest. I just feel like that’s how my old man would have treated me, and that’s just kinda the first reaction.”

Sig is clearly feeling good, having recovered from his 2016 heart attack. As fans saw during Discovery’s recent recap special, his brother Edgar jokingly asked him to sign a contract that said he won’t again stay in the wheelhouse during a 24- or 48-hour grind when the Northwestern lands on good numbers. So will we see him push himself too far this season? That’s one spoiler he reluctantly gave up: “I learned how to tap out,” he said.

Watch the full interview below for more from the captains, including a discussion about how they pick greenhorns (and handle them when they can’t cut it on deck); the moments they’re happiest have been captured on camera (for Josh, whose whole adult life has basically been on TV, one is his final conversation with his father, since he was too emotional to remember what he said); and why they believe the show is still such a hit after more than a decade on the air.

Deadliest Catch Season 14 premieres Tuesday, April 10 at 9 p.m., following “The Bait” pre-show at 8 p.m., on Discovery. The all-new Discovery Go series Deadliest Catch: Greenhorn is streaming now.

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Man overboard in the 'Deadliest Catch' Season 14 trailer (exclusive)

The wait is almost over for the new season of Discovery’s Deadliest Catch. As our exclusive trailer debut announces, the Emmy-winning reality show is back April 10. There’s a lot to look forward to, including the return of Josh Harris and the Cornelia Marie. But according to the network, there’s also “injuries and Coast Guard rescues stacking up at alarming rates.”

A Summer Bay deckhand falls overboard during one storm — the most serious issue for Capt. Wild Bill Wichrowski, who also faces one of the worst engine failures of his career and the loss of some of his crab quota to the Brenna A‘s young gun, Capt. Sean Dwyer. The Brenna A, unfortunately, also takes on more than $30,000 worth of damage after being bashed by a monster wave.

The Brenna A vs. the Bering Sea (Photo: Discovery)

The Saga comes into the season with a $750,000 makeover, putting the pressure firmly on Capt. Jake Anderson to produce. As the new footage reveals, he’ll have to do it without the help of his mentor, Capt. Sig Hansen, who literally throws him out of the Northwestern wheelhouse. For Sig, who’s feeling strong after his 2016 heart attack, this season is about proving he’s still the best in the business. That’s a title rival captain Keith Colburn of the Wizard desperately wants, though it won’t come easy. According to Discovery, “as the season wears on, a problem develops that could put Keith’s season — and life — in jeopardy.” Presumably that has something to do with him asking if there’s a fuel spill and ordering the crew into their survival suits in the trailer.

Josh Harris in the wheelhouse of the Cornelia Marie (Photo: Discovery)

All eyes will, of course, be on Josh Harris, who’ll again co-captain the Cornelia Marie with Casey McManus. “I was so happy to see the boat. I kissed it when I saw it,” he told Yahoo Entertainment before heading out of Dutch Harbor, Alaska last October. The boat itself has also been through a major overhaul, and most of the crew is new. “Everyone has questions. They’re about to get ’em answered,” Harris told us last fall. “We’re definitely back, and we’re ready to show the world what we can do at full force, a little bit smarter, and with a lot better boat.”

Fans will notice that the Time Bandit won’t be featured this season, but there is another returning character — mother nature. Per the network, “Forty-foot waves, hurricane force winds, heavy-machinery and massive icebergs are just a few reasons that no season is ever the same. Making matters even worse, the sea is terrifyingly heightened by this year’s super moon, a tsunami and some of the worst winter storms on record.”

Before setting sail, the captains will honor their friends and fellow fishermen of the Destination, a vessel in the Bering Sea crab fleet that was lost in February 2017.

Deadliest Catch Season 14 premieres April 10 at 9 p.m. on Discovery, preceded by the first-ever live episode of the pre-show The Bait at 8 p.m. in celebration of the series’ 200th episode.

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