Wild Weather RIPS OFF Winch And Sends 800-lb Crab Pot Crashing To The Deck | Deadliest Catch

240 miles Northeast of Dutch Harbor. Baby, right here is the 107t Saga. D, what’s up? Looks like money in the bank, baby. Crabby Dan 57, the first one. Yeah, boys, we call steady krabbing. Start strong, we keep it up.

Captain Elliot is on banner fishing. Look at this, B! Dude has more quota than anybody in the fleet. Got my job cut out for me, but even with 60,000 lbs in his tanks, the skipper is a long way from calling it a season.

You know, the way I look at crab fishing is, the captain can find the crab, but a great captain, he can stay with the crab. Oho, yeah! Let’s call that a crab land. Suck it! Keep finding which way they’re going, and you can stay in front of them to stay on the crab.

Stack those on. The skipper stacks and moves his gear to keep one step in front of the school. Feels good, man. Come out with a clear head, know things are good at home. He’s pretty focused this season. He’s kind of on the right track, but sometimes he kind of waivers from that. I’ve got to remind him of that because nobody else will.

Yeah, so far he’s doing a pretty good job. This is how you build a team right here. Before you know it, this thing will be 72. The high part of the year, right there, boy—72. Booah! Yeah, there are days that you love crab fishing. Today is one of those days. Not a better job in the world. Spirits are good, everybody’s busy.

Watch out, guys, watch out, watch out! The winch just fell off while stacking pots. The crane winch tore loose, sending an 800lb pot crashing to the deck and disabling the crane. That’s a heavy switch.

Watch out! Get the crane secure, squirt out and put the crane down. Damn it! Right when you’re just freaking moving along, you get a break. I’m coming down right now. Send weight up here to drive. Put that down! We need to get up here now.

The winch just ripped off the crane. The winch controls the line that lifts and lowers the pots. I’ve got to get down there. I’ve got to get my stuff on. Kind of a pain before we can go in without it. Fishing is at a standstill. Never a dull moment on the FP crabber. A piece of equipment breaks like that, it could land on your head or something, take you out, you never see it coming.

We need to start taking the dental tape off those fittings. When it pulled, it pulled that winch all the way off. There’s no way to reattach the winch at sea. What we need to do is get a chain fall from inside and hook it around there and chain fall down to here.

The skipper needs to get creative. I’ve got to climb up the boom. He’s putting a strap on it so we can put this chain fall on it. We take the weight off, unhook the hose, and we can lower this safely. First, he must secure the broken winch.

I mean, down on the deck, it’s super rolly, but you get up even higher and it’s even more magnified. In 10t seas, yeah, it’s really dangerous. You never see the skipper up there, that’s for damn sure. I give Wood props for that; usually, you send one of the deckhands up there.

Big roller! Elliot, dude, you need to come back this way. Roger. Okay, good. I went through the hydro line. The winch would have fallen all the way on deck and quite possibly could have killed somebody.

With the winch safely removed, up and down, Elliot has a plan for a temporary fix. Essentially, we’re going to use a straight boom crane—throwback to the old school, back in the 70s. The captain runs a line through the eye holes of the boom, down through the bucket, allowing the crane to lift and move pots without the winch and keeping the Saga fishing.

You, my dad, the two of us together—really, there ain’t nothing we can’t fix… or break. Yeah, or break. It’s going. It’s feeling kind of limited as to what we can do, but we can still make it. You know, we got that fixed, so now it’s right back to it. That could have been a major disaster right there. We’re just really lucky the hydro lines caught it.

Here we go. I’m not even mad that it broke; I’m just really happy that nobody got hurt. Yeah, baby! My strategy right now is to haul some pots. It’s all going in. The question is, can I stay on them?

210 miles Northeast of Dutch Harbor. Good morning, Freddy. All right, guys, first one’s coming up. Captain Keith Colburn nudges the Wizard up to his first Baird Dy pots of the season. This year, the Bering Sea is where we’re making our money. Losing the extra king crab just makes it that much more important that we catch this Tanner crab in a timely manner.

What’s going to happen? We’ll see how it goes through the night here, and we should find something. With their king crab paychecks cut in half, a fast and furious Baird Dy season is their only hope.

Looks like a bunch of starfish. Starfish gather on a hard bottom, unlike Baird Dy that tend to feed in muddy terrain. If you see a starfish, you probably won’t see crab.