What happened to Captain Phil on Deadliest Catch? His Wife & Children After His Passing

It is foretold that a legend is not recognized until his death, and we got to see it firsthand in the case of the late Captain Phil Harris. The Deadliest Catch star was taken from us too soon at the age of only 53 years old. On February 9, 2010, he was offloading crab on January 29, 2010, at Saint Paul Island, Alaska, when he suffered a massive stroke and had to be flown to Anchorage for surgery.

There, he was placed in an induced coma to reduce intracranial pressure and swelling, from which he gradually awoke and was reportedly making a swift recovery that even had the doctors surprised. However, he sadly passed away a few weeks later after suffering from an intracranial hemorrhage.

Most of Phil’s bio generally reads him to be a longtime fisherman who started fishing at the young age of eight and began crab fishing by the time he was in high school. Harris then slaved away as an unpaid deckhand until he became 21 years old, making him one of the youngest captains on the Bering Sea.

However, the sons he left behind, Josh and Jake Harris, have painted a tragically different life of their father after his death in their accounts for the book Captain Phil Harris: The Legendary Crab Fisherman, Our Hero, or Dad in 2013.

Phil Harris lost his mom when he was only 27 years old to skin cancer. He was eight years old then, and his father, Grant Harris, despite his wishes and efforts to be a good father to Phil, did not know how to properly raise a child alone. His multiple jobs did not leave him much quality time with his son. Jake reflected in the book: “My grandpa didn’t know how to raise a kid, so he raised a worker.”

Harris, as expected of an unguarded child, grew up to be a rebellious teenager who left home at 15 years old. Daily Mail reports he tore around town on his motorbike, got into trouble with the law, drank, smoked, partied, and finally, for want of anything else to do, returned to the only thing he knew—working for free on board a crabber. He was called “Dirt” during his time as an unpaid deckhand, both for his job cleaning the bait and his lack of personal hygiene.

Even after he became a captain and finally started earning some good money, his lifestyle was anything but glamorous. “My dad once told me that when he was a young crab fisherman, he’d get a big fat paycheck, buy huge amounts of cocaine, rent the penthouse of a nice hotel, and rotate the girls in and out,” older son Josh Harris recounts. “That’s how he lived his life for a long time. He’d get a check for eighty thousand dollars, but after three weeks, it was gone.”

Pharmaceutical-quality Peruvian flake cocaine and high-grade strains of cannabis were the way Phil rolled. Furthermore, Phil was also an avid gambler who would lose three hundred dollars’ worth of chips in just three seconds. A man like that could not expect to be married or be a family man, but that did not stop him from falling in love with his first wife, Mary, an exotic dancer from a grotty club he used to go to.

They married in 1982 and had two sons: Josh, born in 1983, and Jake, born in 1985. Their marriage, however, was far from perfect and filled with infidelity from both sides, with each side mostly indulging in the same immoral act as a form of vengeance.

Infidelity was only the first of the couple’s marital woes. The book recounts a time Phil drove his Harley straight through the couple’s home. Harris had a reputation for wrecking cars and marriages, both his and others’. The couple finally divorced in 1991.

Harris went on to get remarried to a second wife, Teresa, not even a year after his first divorce on January 22, 1992. His second marriage was just as toxic and unstable as his first one, but this time it was Phil himself and his sons who were at the receiving end of its repercussions. Josh did not hold back in expressing the contempt he held for his “evil creature” of a stepmother, whom he and his brother even referred to as “Satan himself.”

She would not only abuse them but also drive their father to depression until the marriage ended in 2006. Teresa died of a heart attack in 2011, and Josh states, “I didn’t feel bad; she was one of the meanest people I ever met.”

The book also talks in great depth about Phil Harris’s last moments, where he asked his first wife, Mary, to marry him again. Their relationship had become better over the years, but Mary refused, stating to him that he was a better friend than a husband.

The show documented Phil’s surgery that gave him almost a month of extra life upon his open request. “We weren’t just interlopers who were going to walk in and say, ‘Hey, you’re dying, can we film it?'” says producer Tom Beers. It was Phil himself who, in his weakened state, couldn’t speak, so he gestured for a pen and paper and began writing, “You’ve got to finish the story. It needs an ending.”

The book may have painted an unexpected and dark picture of Harris’s life, but it nevertheless continues to show Phil as the strong, proud, and legendary fisherman who could chug a gallon of solicit vodka for breakfast. Josh Harris has managed to continue his father’s legacy, as he is now the co-captain of his father’s boat, the Cornelia Marie, along with his father’s longtime friend, Casey McManus.

The discovery of his father’s maps and plans to fish for ahi tuna in Hawaii aboard the Cornelia Marie even gave the idea for Josh and Casey to get their own spin-off series called Deadliest Catch: Bloodline. One of the posters for short season 1 of the spin-off even featured a symbolic image of half Phil Harris and half Josh.

Jake Harris, however, seems to have followed the wrong aspect of his father’s footsteps. After appearing on Deadliest Catch until 2012, Jake left the show because of his addiction to alcohol and drugs. He has had multiple run-ins with the law in the past, mostly being arrested and charged with DUIs. His most serious charge until now came recently when he was arrested in January 2019 after attempting to flee from the cops. Not only was he charged with a DUI and fleeing from law enforcement, but he was also caught in possession of heroin with the intention to distribute or manufacture, earning him an 18-month jail sentence.

Phil Harris may have been a troubled man, but his life’s brutally honest depiction also does not dismiss the fact that he was a beloved celebrity to millions and a captain of legendary proportions.