Season 1
| Series # | Season # | Title | Original airdate |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | "Greenhorns" | April 12, 2005 (2005-04-12) |
| Introductions to the crews of the ships and the backgrounds for the greenhorns who would be working for the first time on some of the ships, as well as some boats' traditions for dealing with greenhorns—Sig Hansen, captain of the Northwestern, refuses to greet or acknowledge greenhorns until after he sees how they work out on board. The ships departed to sea for the king crab season. | |||
| 2 | 2 | "Long Sleepless Nights" | April 19, 2005 (2005-04-19) |
| The crews of the ships set all of their crab pots and waited to retrieve them up. The greenhorns started to feel fatigued after only one night. The Northwestern greenhorn, Bradford, was unnerved by the sight of his first king crab—"they look like aliens," he observed—but was corrected by deck boss Edgar Hansen: "They're gorgeous! Look just like giant dollar bills!" Some ships started catching lots of crabs immediately—the Northwestern had two "riders" on pots kept in underwater storage to add to their tanks before even pulling their first official pots—while others experienced problem after problem with both equipment and finding the crab. | |||
| 3 | 3 | "Lady Luck" | April 26, 2005 (2005-04-26) |
| The crews continued to set their crab pots with mixed results—highliner boats like the Fierce Allegiance and the Northwestern were pulling lower numbers than expected; the Western Viking finally found the crab after an extremely bad first string. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game announced the end of the season after only 2 days and the captains started to worry they would not catch enough crab to be profitable. | |||
| 4 | 4 | "Beat the Clock" | May 3, 2005 (2005-05-03) |
| The fleet is forced to make difficult decisions about whether to continue last-minute pot placements or pull in all of their gear and cut their losses on the short season rather than violate the law. The Hansen brothers on board the Northwestern decide not to launch any more pots and instead go after a string of pots in the northern king crab waters that Sig dubs "Long Tall Sally"; the decision is rewarded when the pots come in huge, enabling the Northwestern to win the final King Crab Derby title. The crews rush to finish pulling in the last of the crab pots for the season and head back to Dutch Harbor to get in line for the crab processor. The greenhorns make decisions about whether to continue with their new careers or to go on with their lives. After a very successful offload at the Northwestern traditional offload port, Akutan, Bradford, the Northwestern greenhorn, is awarded 10% of a deckhand's share for his hard work and good attitude—about $1600—and finally gets a greeting and handshake from Captain Sig Hansen. | |||
| 5 | 5 | "Dead of Winter" | May 10, 2005 (2005-05-10) |
| The ships left Dutch Harbor for the deadlier opilio crab season, the last one to be held under the derby-style rules. The weather was treacherous, with heavy gale warnings and high seas predicted. The Lady Alaska had to return to port due to electrical problems, costing them a day of the already short season. The Northwestern headed out to the far northern Opilio fishing grounds, near the Russian border. As the rest of the boats neared the fishing grounds, a Coast Guard alert was issued to the fleet: An EPIRB, belonging to the F/V Big Valley, had been activated, and no one on the Big Valley was answering radio hails or satellite phone calls. Three fishing vessels, including Maverick and the Cornelia Marie, started the search, joined just before dawn by a Coast Guard helicopter, but found nothing at the position indicated by the EPIRB. As dawn broke, debris from the Big Valley was all that could be seen, making it clear that the boat sunk. A single life raft from the Big Valley was found with one survivor, deck boss Cache Seel, in it. Seel, who had managed to get into his survival suit before getting tossed into the sea, confirmed that the Big Valley capsized and went down quickly; three men died shortly after falling into the sea with no survival suits on. The Coast Guard found another man wearing a survival suit and pulled him from the water, but declared him dead shortly thereafter. | |||
| 6 | 6 | "Man Overboard" | May 17, 2005 (2005-05-17) |
| The last man was found from the Big Valley disaster, raising the death toll to five, with Cache Seel as the only survivor. The boats of the fleet were finally able to begin casting pots after a day of delays. However, shortly after getting started, a man fell overboard on the Sultan. The ship was unable to rescue him, bringing the death toll to six before the first 24 hours had passed. Captain Jeff Weeks of the Billikin realizes that the dead crewman from the Sultan is a friend of one of his own crewmen, who earlier expressed hope that his friend was not the one who died. Sig decides to let his crewman know once the season is over; the man does not need the distraction to put himself in danger out on the deck. | |||
| 7 | 7 | "High Hopes" | May 24, 2005 (2005-05-24) |
| The Bering Sea claimed the lives of six fishermen less than a day into the opilio crab season. Crab pots had been soaking for 12 hours, despite the loss of human life the crews began to pull pots. Hopes were high as the weather changes again, for the better. Fishing was easier for the first time this season. | |||
| 8 | 8 | "Good Fishing" | May 31, 2005 (2005-05-31) |
| With calm seas and unusually warm weather, three days of record catches for the fleet had crew seeing dollar signs. One boat had a huge problem that left them vulnerable in the Bering Sea; they scrambled to return to fishing. Day four of the opilio season got underway, with high numbers still coming in, rumors flew of early closure. Captains were speculating when the quota will be met and the season closed. | |||
| 9 | 9 | "The Clock's Ticking" | June 7, 2005 (2005-06-07) |
| Opilio crab season was eighty-four hours old, and the hunt for "Alaskan Gold" intensified as rumors flew about the season closure. This rumor pushed the crews harder, so boats were wondering where to put the extra crab. Other boats were just now hitting the sweet spot, and trying to make up for lost time. As the announcement of the end of the season arrives, giving boats just 36 more hours to work the fishing grounds, fatigued crews are pushed to work as hard as they can in the remaining time. Alaska crab fishing is normally done in a derby-style competition, where crews catch as much crab as they can during the season; the 2005 Opilio season would be the last year fishing like this, and the resulting IFQ (Individual Fishing Quota) system will put many smaller boats (like the Lady Alaska) out of business. All the captains express a great desire to make this last run the best; the Maverick hustles to fill their tanks a second time in the short season, while the Northwestern builds a "deck load", a holding pen to store the crab from their last pots on deck with water passing over them in hopes that they will survive long enough to reach the processors. | |||
| 10 | 10 | "The Final Run" | June 14, 2005 (2005-06-14) |
| This opilio season had been a deadly one, with the deaths of the Big Valley crew and a crewman from the Sultan who fell overboard just hours later. Boats were reaching their holding tank capacities and crews were reaching their mental and physical limits, but the fleet kept going in an effort to catch the year’s wages in the remaining 24 hours. As the last few hours ticked down, the second leg of the race began, the race to the processing plants. Off-loading is done on a first-come-first-serve basis, making decisions of when to return to port critical to the success of a season. Sig Hansen of the Northwestern, knowing his deck load will not last long in the weather, gathers the last of his pots and sets course for the processors. Though the trip to the processor should be the safest part of the trip, Hansen relates the story of the St. Patrick, whose crew abandoned ship in December 1981 just a few miles from the Kodiak as their boat took on water; only two crew members survived, a loss made even more tragic by the knowledge that the St. Patrick had managed to right itself after the crew abandoned ship and did not sink until several days after it had been successfully towed into port. As luck would have it, the Northwestern becomes one of the first boats to arrive at the processors, and their deck load weathered the journey well; however, the crew takes great pleasure in riding a fellow crewman's poor observation skills when his tally of the crab poundage fails to match up with the official total by over 20,000 pounds. Since crab will not last forever on a boat's hold, a crab boat's place in line to get to the processor is crucial; access to the processor is limited, and the wait could be hours or even days. Days would cost thousands in dead crab; when crab die in a boat's hold, their deceased bodies release poisons into the hold that affect all the crab, often resulting in a chain reaction of deaths creating massive amounts of "deadloss", or dead crabs that cannot be processed. The Maverick lost a portion of their load to deadloss when their wait in line for the processor turned into an extra week at sea, but the rest of their load held up well and the boat turned a nice profit, becoming one of the few vessels to have filled their holding tanks twice within the short Opilio season. The Northwestern won the 2005 Derby with the highest overall catch total in both halves of the Alaskan crab season (King and Opilio). Captains who would not return for the new IFQ-style fishing bid their crews goodbye as they return to port; other captains who would be going on under IFQ acknowledged that crab fishing, as they knew it, will change forever with the end of the Derby era. | |||
| "Best of Season 1" | March 26, 2006 (2006-03-26) | ||
| Recap of the first season. |
Read more about this topic: List Of Deadliest Catch Episodes
Famous quotes containing the word season:
“Life contracts and death is expected,
As in a season of autumn.
The soldier falls.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)