A Second-Hand Brush With the Deadliest Celebrity

This was the closest brush we've had with Deadliest celebrity. Looking over the show's website, we're surprised we have not run into more people who know them. A majority of the captains and owners reside in Washington. That makes the reality of the show even more tangible. It's nice to see local fishermen getting some deserved recognition. Yet, all in all, they are being fairly low-key and sensible about the publicity. Perhaps local fans are the same. We suspect that, in a very Northwestern and understated way, this show is wildly popular here too.

At first, we were a little wary about a documentary de-mystifying Bering Sea fishing. Sure, sure, we read all about how it and underwater welding were the world's deadliest professions. But like the secrets of the vast sea itself, we were happy leaving it's vagaries way out off shore. There's romance in the unknown. Given our wanderlust, perhaps we even harbored a desire to go there ourselves someday and learn first-hand.

We grew up on the great inland seas which we suppose gave us a taste for waterborne activity. Now we have been becoming Northwesterners. While on campus, one of our favorite past-times is taking walks from the UW's boathouse to the awesome collection of stuff at the School of Oceanography. At work, we're blessed with a window view of the Fremont Bridge and canal. Every working ship, be it a tug pushing a barge full of gravel or a fish processing vessel or the UW's R/V Thomas Thompson, that plies the canal rekindles our desire to proceed as the way opens and come back reporting the Truth as it has been revealed to us.

We don't believe that we have the mettle to actually work on any of the vessels in the show and, for that reason, maybe we'll never find ourselves in the middle of crappy weather in the Bering Sea. So we'll just have to revel in our ferries, our water taxis, our Clippers, our Ballard Locks, and occasional boat rides that we can mooch off of friends. Life looks different from the water and, in Seattle, there is absolutely no excuse for not stepping off of dry land to examine it from a different perspective.

Seattle has long had connections to Alaska and the Sea, of course. However, they don't always manifest themselves in obvious ways. On a personal level, our Monroe anecdote illustrates this. But thinking back further, we remember researching and processing archival photographs of the cable-laying ship Dellwood which operated between Seattle and Alaska until sinking in the Aleutians in 1943. In the course of that research, we ran across the fantastic H.W. McCurdy Marine History of the Pacific Northwest, published in 1966. This excellent tome details in ridiculously painstaking detail, year by year, the goings-on of all ships in the Pacific Northwest. For example:

The wooden motorship Sierra was purchased by the Lomen Commercial Co. ...She was converted to a refrigerator ship for the purpose of carrying reindeer meat from the company’s Alaska herds.

...

Another well-known government vessel, the cableship Dellwood, made surplus by the installation of radio telephone communication with Alaska, was sold by the Shipping Board to P. E. Harris & Co., Seattle salmon packers, for $20,000. After a $100,000 refurbishing at the Todd Dry Docks, the vessel was placed in the Alaska cannery trade in charge of Capt. Andrew J. Borkland, with Anton Bergseth as chief engineer.

So we are grateful to the documentary crews for bringing us a taste of Alaskan crab fishing and to the vessel crews for allowing it to be documented. In a way, documentaries like this are continuing the fine work of the H.W. McCurdy. And at the risk of getting too swell-headed, we suppose this is not all that different from the terrestrially-based things that we do: go places, take some cheesy photos, and write lame accounts later that we think are entertaining.

We like Deadliest Catch, then, not only because it has shown us glimpses of a world previously unknown to us but, like all good documentary, it has also put a genuine human face on that world, whether it's laughing, swearing, or crying. As saps Great Lakers, we get a little somber around November 10th every year, so we can certainly empathize with the sinking of the Ocean Challenger.

Here's to the ships and their crewmembers who have performed gallantly in the execution of their duties.

Image courtesy of tania k.