Captain Phil Harris

by Josh Harris

  “It went way beyond seasickness,” said Thom. “We all thought we were going to die.”

  What amazed him, impressing upon him from the start that he was in the company of men who redefined toughness, was that, while he and his two-man crew hung on like passengers on a runaway roller-coaster, praying it would stop, the boat’s crew went about their business like it was just another day at the office, dropping pots, hauling them up, and sorting the crab.

  The only effect the weather had on the boat’s crew was to delay the return to port, providing an opportunity for two more days of fishing.

  “These were hard-ass, hard-core guys,” said Thom, who realized he had found Alaska at its most extreme in the waters far off the coast of the forty-ninth state. “Waves were blowing across the deck and crew members were getting swept in every direction except overboard. It was insanity.”

  Insanity that Thom and his own crew captured on camera, giddy at the thought of how good all this would look on screen.

  By then, he didn’t need any further assurance that he had found the macho men who could provide him with the next great reality show. Nevertheless, he found additional proof belowdecks when he went down to the galley.

  It was about twenty minutes after a particularly rough wave had smashed into the boat. One of the deckhands had been injured by the torrent of water, hurled with such force that one of his legs had been torn open, blood everywhere.

  Thom found the deckhand on the galley table, sewing up the deep gash with a needle and thread. All alone. No one to help him, nothing to deaden the pain.

  “Dude,” Thom told his cameraman, “we ain’t in Kansas anymore. This is a whole new breed of guy.”

  The adrenaline flowing through him enabled Thom to shake off any apprehension he felt about the hazardous conditions and focus on the amazing sights and sounds before him.

  It became a mantra for him as he kept telling himself and his cameraman, “Just get it on tape. Get it on tape. Get it on tape.”

  Thom had one camera that, on slow speed, could run for four hours.

  He decided to tape it to the mast to get an aerial view of the deck and the sea beyond. With precision and ingenuity, he and his cameraman positioned the lens to get the ideal perspective and then securely fastened the camera to withstand whatever the angry sea might subject it to.

  That was great, until the four hours was up and the camera had run out of tape. So Thom or his cameraman had to keep climbing back up that mast, struggling at times to hang on as the boat rocked violently.

  “We had to do it even in the middle of storms,” said Thom, “and I’m thinking, What the hell am I doing?”

  While he and his cameraman were able to get the crowd-pleasing shots they wanted, pulling story lines out of the deckhands was not easy. There was no Phil Harris, Sig Hansen, or Johnathan Hillstrand in that first group.

  “The crew of the Fierce Allegiance were not TV guys,” said Thom. “They didn’t have wise-ass personalities. They were just a bunch of hardworking guys.”

  Guys who didn’t really get the concept that would grow into Deadliest Catch. Didn’t really understand the potential for worldwide exposure.

  • • •

  At first, the deckhands just ignored Thom’s group, paying attention to them only if they got in the way.

  Determined to win the crew over, Thom did everything he could for them, from cooking their meals to doing their laundry, even helping pull crabs out of pots.

  After the third day, he knew he was finally accepted. That day began with Thom crawling out of his bunk after a few precious hours of sleep, unable to straighten out his fingers. They were frozen in a condition referred to by crab fishermen as “the Claw.”

  It’s very common for deckhands, after hours and hours of grabbing crabs out of pots in subzero temperatures, to find their hands are stuck in that gripping position, as if there were crabs still in their palms.

  Normally, moving the hands around after rising, along with a warming sun on good days, loosens them up. Unaware of that, Thom, desperate for relief, was thrilled when a deckhand gave him a solution.

  Uric acid, Thom was told. That’s the best way to eliminate the stiffness.

  Translation: urine.

  Not about to turn down any suggestion that would allow him to grip a camera again, Thom walked out on deck, unzipped his fly, and proceeded to pee on his hands.

  As he did so, he heard peals of laughter coming from above. Looking up, he saw the entire crew leaning on a railing, thoroughly enjoying the prank they had pulled.

  Thom had become one of the guys.

  As the trip stretched to a week, he and his film crew began to run out of cameras.

  “We burned through all five we brought,” he said. “Because of the saltwater, they were done. I started borrowing some of the guys’ personal video cameras.”

  Thom even took the deck camera, used by the captain to constantly survey the ship.

  “At the end, I had no alternative,” he said. “Today, on these boats, we bring millions of dollars of technology. Back then, it was just me and two guys with nothing left at the end.”

  When he got back to Dutch Harbor, Thom realized he was fortunate just to be able to be back on solid ground, cameras or no cameras. The storm had taken seven lives from two boats, the Lin-J and the Seawolf.

  The plan had been to spend just twelve minutes of the two-hour Extreme Alaska special on crab fishing.

  But when Thom flew back home, he told officials at the Discovery Channel, “Look, there’s something bigger here than just twelve minutes.”

  He got no argument from executives at Discovery. “Jaws were dropping every minute that segment was on,” said Clark Bunting, former president and general manager of the channel. “It was hard to believe anybody does this for a living.”

  Thom got another sixty thousand dollars from Discovery, flew back to Alaska with more cameras and fresh ideas, and got enough material for a sixty-minute special.

  It was called The Deadliest Job in the World.

  “Like many of our reality shows,” Thom said, “it was based on high stakes and high rewards in a really unique location.”

  The same could be said for Thom himself: high stakes and, as it turned out, a high reward.

  “With no promotion,” he recalled, “the show popped four million viewers, a massive number. It was the most lucrative show Discovery ever did.”

  Yet it took another three years before the decision was made by the network’s officials to again dip their collective toes into the Bering Sea. In 2003, they commissioned Thom to head north once more, this time to produce a three-hour special.

  Fortified with an enlarged film crew of six for the sequel, Thom, already knowing the kind of dramatic footage he could get, focused on finding some equally dramatic story lines to flesh out the show. The crew spread out, going to Seattle and Kodiak in addition to Dutch Harbor to find colorful captains to headline the program.

  With around 250 boats in the Bering fleet back then, there were plenty to choose from.

  “We had a real luxury when it came to casting,” said Thom.

  This time, he didn’t have to do anybody’s laundry to be accepted. Those in the crab industry had seen the one-hour special and the public’s enthusiastic reaction to the material. They realized what being in the camera’s eye could do for them.

  “I think when you are in a position like Phil and all the other captains and you’re out there alone in the Bering Sea,” said Thom, “the water could pull you in one day and it would be like you never existed.

  “So many people go through their whole lives, do a great job in whatever profession they are in, take care of their wives and kids, and then they’re gone, merely a memory.

  “But a good television show can immortalize you. It can allow you to make your mark in the world. That’s especially true of crab boat captains. They are so damn heroic, rulers in their own little kingdom.”

  Of all the capta
ins that Thom was interested in, only three or four turned him down.

  He selected six boats for the special that would be called America’s Deadliest Season: Alaskan Crab Fishing. Among the captains were Phil Harris and Sig Hansen.

  Getting out onto the Bering Sea, Thom again found himself at odds with the elements, but for a very different reason.

  Aboard the Fierce Allegiance, he had struggled in a storm far fiercer than he was prepared for. This time, looking forward to footage of fishermen battling driving rain and menacing waves, he found nothing but calm seas and mild weather.

  One deckhand fell overboard, and his successful rescue, caught on camera, provided the ideal drama, terrifying danger with a happy ending.

  “But the rest of the material was pretty mundane,” said Thom.

  That feeling was shared by the Discovery Channel hierarchy.

  “This is not very good,” Thom was told. “Not much excitement. No storms.”

  “I thought we were dead,” he said.

  Indeed, the Discovery Channel decided to bury the show. Plans were scrapped to break the program into three one-hour specials on consecutive Sunday nights. Instead, all three hours were aired in one block on a Sunday with no advance promotion. Not even a “Coming up next . . .”

  According to Thom, the attitude was “Let’s just get rid of it.”

  Back in 2003, a normal Sunday night rating for the Discovery Channel was a 0.8, as in 800,000 viewers. “That show started at point eight and went up every fifteen minutes,” Thom said. “It went from eight hundred thousand to three point eight million in three hours.

  “Crab fishing is made for TV, particularly when it’s shot in Alaska in the winter, because there’s very little sunlight. So it’s dark and menacing, but, for contrast, you’ve got those beautiful sodium lights beaming down on the deck. Everything’s wet, so you get that slick look. Everybody wears yellow and orange slickers that enhance the color, making the picture really vivid. It pops out at you. In the background, the Bering Sea trails off into blackness. It’s almost like the crew is on a spaceship. They know if they get off, they are dead. They are in an extremely confined work space facing extraordinarily dangerous conditions.”

  It was a scene, said Thom, guaranteed to suck in viewers.

  “The eye and the brain stuck to it,” he said. “That’s why those people kept watching. Nobody left.”

  Nothing gets a TV executive’s attention like a few million viewers. The next day, Thom got a call from Billy Campbell, who had just that day become head of the Discovery Channel.

  “Thom,” Campbell said, “that was unbelievably exciting. I want more, fourteen, fifteen shows. How quickly can I get them?”

  “About a year,” Thom said.

  “What? What do you mean a year?”

  “Yeah,” said Thom, “we’ll shoot it next season.”

  “Screw the season,” said Campbell, who was accustomed to working on scripted shows. “Just get a couple of boats out there.”

  “And do what?” asked Thom.

  “Do whatever. We can’t wait a year.”

  Ultimately, Campbell had no choice but to wait for the start of the next crab season, but his frustration quickly dissolved when Deadliest Catch debuted in 2005.

  • • •

  Even with the success of the earlier specials and the fame they had bestowed on the participating crab boat captains, they still weren’t about to make life easier for the film crew that first season.

  “None of the captains ever asked what they could do to help,” said Thom. “The only thing they ever said was, ‘Just stay the fuck out of our way.’ We were dog meat on their boats, nothing but a pain in their ass.”

  As the seasons rolled by, however, that changed, as it has on Thom’s other shows.

  On the first season of Ax Men, Thom and his crew were filming a guy chopping down a tree. When the job was done, the cameraman said he needed to pause to change batteries. By the time he was done, the ax man was gone, off cutting another tree a quarter of a mile away without the slightest concern about the cameraman.

  “By season two,” said Thom, “I was the one changing batteries and the ax man says to me, ‘Where do you want to go next? I was thinking about cutting down that tree over there. What do you think?’

  “As soon as they get a sense of how many people are watching and how famous they are becoming, it all changes.”

  Still, the idea of having a camera constantly in their faces as they try to keep their boats on course, their crews alive, and their crab pots full causes different captains to react in different ways.

  “Keith Colburn [captain of the Wizard] is still trying to throw our cameramen off the boat,” Thom said. “He’s thrown them out of the wheelhouse and off the deck. His favorite line is ‘Get the fuck out of here or I’ll kill you.’ ”

  At first, Phil, too, had serious doubts about allowing a film crew on board, according to Jeff Conroy, the producer assigned to the Cornelia Marie in the show’s first season.

  “Well, what do I have to do?” he demanded of Jeff, now executive producer of Deadliest Catch.

  “You don’t have to do anything other than your job,” Jeff told him. “I’ll get what I need.”

  As Phil’s apprehension began to melt, it was obvious to Jeff that this captain was going to be a star on the show.

  “Phil was a producer’s dream to work with,” Jeff said, “because he had very little filter. He told the camera his whole life, warts and all.”

  “Once Phil learned to love the camera,” agreed Thom, “he embraced the show. He was so bright with his observations and so funny with us.

  “Phil was a military shell filled with testosterone. He’d make a lot of noise, but then, he’d back it up. He was a man’s man.”

  “Phil didn’t just live life,” said Clark. “He grabbed life by the throat and shook it.”

  Not only did he have an appealing story to tell, but Phil learned to enhance it for the audience, creating even more drama than was inherently found in the hostile environment surrounding him.

  “We would be looking at forty-foot waves,” said Jeff, “and Phil, for the benefit of the camera, would say, ‘Those are fucking sixty-foot waves. If they come over, they will bust these windows and could kill you.’

  “We’d be walking around the deck and he’d say, ‘You get in the way of those pots and they will crush you like a soda can.’ He could be so dramatic that way and I loved it.”

  Jeff soon realized that behind the menacing warnings and the salty language was a master of the seas.

  “The way he ran that boat was awe inspiring,” said Jeff. “He was very much the skipper. I thought, It may be crazy out here in the Bering Sea, but I’m going to be all right with this guy. He knows what he’s doing.”

  However, emboldened by his faith in the captain, Jeff soon abandoned caution.

  “It’s the same with nearly all my producers,” he said. “When they first go out on the boat, most of their footage is shot from the vantage point of the shelter deck, the part of the ship protected from the sea. Everything is from that one angle because they stay where they’re comfortable.”

  Not only are the huge waves intimidating, but, with pots swinging overhead and the deck moving violently at unpredictable angles, the shelter deck seems the only sane place to be.

  “It’s quite a lot to absorb,” said Jeff. “But, as the days go by, the new producers and cameramen venture out farther and farther. Soon they are all over the boat like the seasoned guys.”

  Jeff himself went through that learning stage.

  “I would start to tell myself, Okay, you can go two steps farther and not die,” he said.

  But Jeff soon went from fearful to foolhardy. Despite crashing waves and a restless sea one day, he wandered out to the edge of the deck, leaning on the railing.

  “It’s a mentality many producers and cameramen experience,” Jeff said. “I wanted that awesome shot that completely douses me and
the camera.”

  As a gigantic wave indeed engulfed him, he heard a loud, angry voice crackling over the loudspeaker from the wheelhouse.

  “Jeff,” screamed the voice, “get the fuck out of there!”

  Recognizing it was Phil, Jeff didn’t need to be told twice.

  But later, he did need to be lectured a second time after “another instance of stupidity,” as he put it. This one occurred one night with waves soaring over the Cornelia Marie’s starboard side. Jeff noticed that the camera secured outside above the wheelhouse was not pointed in that direction.

  Determined to capture the moment, Jeff climbed out onto a plankway that encircles the wheelhouse to turn the camera. Not only was it freezing outside, but the seas grew ever rougher, forcing him to struggle to secure his balance as he was repeatedly slapped in the face with wave after wave. Though the plankway was becoming slicker and his fingers were growing numb, Jeff managed to turn the camera.

  But how was he going to get back inside? As his grip on the situation seemed to get more tenuous, he thought, So this is how I’m going to go. I didn’t even need to do this. How dumb of me to be out here.

  Jeff fell to his knees, gripped the plankway as tightly as he could, and crawled back around to the wheelhouse entrance, embarrassed at the thought of how he must look to any crabbers who might be watching but heartened by the realization that, most importantly, he was going to survive to see his wife and kids.

  “Sometimes you get so excited about what you’re doing as a filmmaker,” said Jeff, “that you lose perspective.”

  With all they are confronted with, film crews hardly need another challenge, but they often get one nevertheless from deckhands who don’t want them around. It’s not just the captains who can be obstinate.

  “In the beginning, a lot of the fishermen did not want to be on camera,” Jeff said. “They saw no real benefit to us annoying the hell out of them. You’re putting microphones on them and generally interfering with their job. If you want to do an interview, that might be five minutes they could be sleeping. And sleep is such a valuable commodity out there.

  “The way the deckhands often see it, we are making a difficult job even more difficult.”