Deadliest Catch Captain Derrick Ray shares a behind-the-scenes look at the popular TV show and what fishing the Bering Sea was really like

If you were a fan of The Deadliest Catch on the Discovery Channel, you either loved him or you hated him. Regardless, it was a turning point in the series when Captain Phil Harris left unexpectedly due to health issues, leaving the Cornelia Marie without a captain.

Derrick Ray, a commercial fisherman from Seaside, had been asked to finish out the season in Harris’s place.

“I was helping out an old friend,” he said. “When Phil had the stroke they called me up and asked if I would come take over.”

His relationship with the former Captain of the Cornelia Marie went back decades, almost from the first time Ray first landed in Kodiak, Alaska.

Ray grew up in Seaside and planned on following his father’s footsteps in the logging industry. But in 1980 the logging industry started shutting down and in 1988, Ray jumped on a fishing boat and found himself in Kodiak eight days later.

“I was a green horn, I guarantee you that,” he said. “The first six months I was there I hated it. Every time that boat came to town I wanted to go home but I didnt know what to go home too.”

After a few years under his belt, he went to work for Ralph Collins on a boat he owned called Milky Way.

“He was the greatest captain I ever worked for,” Ray said.

At 23 years old, Collins instructed Ray to take the Milky Way out crab fishing.

“I thought he was freaking nuts,” Ray said. “I had never been crab fishing before in my life.” But he took it out for the 11 day season anyway.

“We caught more crab than boats three times our size,” he said. “Beginners luck? Yeah, the whole time. We kept saying, ‘what’s so hard about this! The darn things are everywhere. There’s nothing to crab fishing.'”

When he returned, Collins told Ray he was planning on building a big-time Bering Sea crab boat. He asked Ray if he was ready to spend the rest of his life in the Bering Sea. Ray turned him down; there were other fisheries he wanted to try out.

“I had a one year old daughter at the time and had just bought a house in Kodiak,” Ray recalled.

Colllins went ahead and built the 125-foot crab boat and named it Cornelia Marie, after his wife and hired Captain Phil Harris to run it.

Ray went on to build his own boat, the 136-foot Siberian Sea, which he later sold in 2005 when the fisheries changed.

“What they don’t show you on Deadliest Catch is how the fishery has really changed,” Ray said.

The series’ first season was shot during the final years of derby style fishing, while the following seasons are set after the change to a quota system. During derby-style fishing, a large number of crews competed with each other to catch crab within a certain time window. Now, with what’s called Individual Fishing Quota, qualified owners are given a quota to fill with less time restrictions.

“It’s a controversial system,” said Ray. “In 2005 it went from 250 boats out on the Bering Sea to 50.”

The idea was to make the fisheries safer and increase the value of crab by limiting the market.

“They slowed it down and made it a lot safer,” he said. “In the last seven years, only one man has perished in the Bering Sea. Prior to that, 2.2 men died on average every year.”

After leaving The Milky Way, Ray took a job fishing cod on a boat called The Defiant. It was owned by a man from Astoria who’d moved to Kodiak.

One flat, gorgeous day, Ray and his two crewman filled the boat so full of cod it couldn’t hold another pound. They decided it was time to make the 12 hour run back to Kodiak.

“It wasn’t supposed to blow that day, but it starting blowing,” he recalled. The 70-plus-mile-an-hour winds compounded with 25-foot waves. They got within 30 miles of Kodiak when Ray told the other two crewmen they weren’t going to make it tonight. They turned around and anchored up for the night.

After a few hours, the wind shifted directions, a complete 180, turning the boat.

“It was a bad scenario,” he said. “The right thing to do when thats happening is fire up the main engine, hall up that anchor and sit there and idle into the wind But that isn’t what I chose to do.”

He decided it was best to try and get out of there, but before he could get the boat turned around, a 30 foot wall of water headed their way.

“The crew looked at that wave and then at me and I told them to duck, we’re in big trouble.”

The water hit the boat like a wall of bricks, blowing four windows out in the wheel house. Ray and his crew were standing waist deep in 36 degree water, barefoot.

“The stern of the boat was completely underwater,” he said. “I stood there and looked out there at the water and it seemed like an eternity but it was only just seconds. And the crazy part was, I never felt fear, not for one second. Instead this sadness poured over me and in my mind I started apologizing to my young daughter and my wife and wives and children of the men standing next to me cause I was pretty sure at that moment I had just killed us.”

The boat was a complete wreck, the lights were out, the equipment completely damaged and nobody said a word. Ray told the others to grab their survival suits.

“They never said a word. They had this look on their face you better do something and you better do something right now, this ones on you.”

And right then Ray heard the voice of Captain Collins.

“He told me two things before I took off for the Bering Sea to crab fish that I will never forget: nobody every built a boat to sink and if you give that boat a chance it will bring you home.

“Ralph had taken us to the edge quite a few times; so I did exactly what he did.”

Ray turned the rutter hard towards starboard and gave it all the power it had, knowing it would either drive the boat to the bottom of the sea, which is where they were headed anyway, or it would start rising above water.

“Fortunately for me, my daughter and those two guys and their kids, the stern started rising and we spun that boat around and got it back into the wind and held it there for four hours.”

Eventually the wind started to die down. “I looked at those two guys next to me and I said, we’re going home to see our families. We’re going to make it.”

All they had was a compass, everything else had been destroyed in the storm, but they made it home.

“I could see the lights of Kodiak and at 3 in the morning I had that boat tied into the dock. . We went home and kissed our kids and hugged our wives.”

Ray’s feet were full of shards of glass – he’d never put any shoes on.

The boat itself took a few days of repairing before it was ready to go out again, but on another beautiful, sunny day, Ray untied it from the dock and headed back out to sea.

“I got a mile out of town and turned around and went right back,” he said. “I was scared to death to go back out in that ocean again.”

But go back out he did, eventually.

“Its an inherently dangerous job. But if you do it right youll bring everybody home.,” he said. “You just got to pay attention. Weve all been that close, those of us that are still here It takes five things to go wrong in a catastrophic event in my opinion; if four go wrong and youre smart and lucky, youll make it home. but if that fifth one happens, it doesnt matter how smart or lucky you are.”

Deadliest Catch

In 2010, Ray began his stint on Deadliest Catch to finish season six after Harris’s health problems. His performance was met with critical reviews from fans of the show.

“What you dont see on TV was the rest of the story,” said Captain David Lethin, owner of the Aluetian Ballad from season two. “We loved Phil like a brother. Derrick was just helping out and he was portrayed on TV as being a hard knock, but he was trying to keep people alive He was trying to teach those boys how to run a boat, but at the end of the day there wasn’t a lot he could do, so he finished the job and got them back to town safely.”

“It took me three days to get that crew together,” Ray said. “That was the biggest thing they didn’t show that season. It was all about Phil, and it should have been; it was his show.”

“They’ll portray people however they want to,” Lethin added. “Derrick had the best crews in the fleet and built the best crab boat ever used. His crew was trained, well behaved, and he didn’t have to teach them anything. What you saw on the show was drama to try and make good TV.”

The show chose not to run a scene where Ray talked to Harris on a Satellite phone, right before he died.

“He looked like he was getting better,” Ray recalled. “But the next day he was dead. He asked how I liked his boat and I told him it was a fine little boat. I told him he had a good crew and we were getting the job done for him We lost a really good friend.”

Ray said the show has helped the industry by educating the viewers and driving up the price of crab.

“People love the show and they’re eating more crab, so that’s good,” he said. “But are they the very best crab fishers in the world, like they claim? No. The very best don’t want to be on that show.”

The cameramen weren’t too much of a pain though, he said. Three stationary cameras were going constantly, he said, and two cameramen rotated around the deck, talking to the crew and getting shots.

“They do irritate you sometimes, but their job is to make a show They know their perimeters but they’ve got a job to do too – they’re there to shoot a show and you signed up for it.”

Ray said most of the cameramen were extreme white water rafters, mountain climbers and other adventure-types who know what they were doing.

He also said the show doesn’t show the other side of the story: the wives and children.

“One of the reasons we fish is because we can go wherever we want,” said Lethin. “And the wives and kids are all sitting at home dealing with school, insurance, what to do when the dishwasher breaks Yeah if a crew member gets hurt it’s rough but it’s tough on their side too and they don’t portray that.”

“One year when my daughter was three years old, I spent 363 days away from home,” Ray said. “That was back when I was young and you had to do everything you could to make a living.”

And make a living they did – pulling in sometimes $160,000 a year in the 90s.

“Were pretty simple, we can do one thing and thats catch crab and keep our crew alive and the rest of it you cant even think about, you dont have time,” Lethin said.

With no dedicated medical personal on board, they were also responsible for each others lives.

“Any of us could figure figure out how to stitch somebody up if its not too bad,” Ray said. “If its really bad, wrap it up, apply pressure and run for the harbor.”

Lethin said he’d had crew members who worked for days with crushed fingers or broken arms.

“If you leave the fishing grounds and head back into harbor, you lose half your season and the guy next to you might not make his house payment,” he said. “So usually they want to stay and work and those are the guys you look for in a crew – the ones that tell you they want to stay, no matter what.”

The show portrayed a lot of controversy between the crew, which Ray said wouldn’t be allowed on a good fishing boat.

“If fights last longer than 10 seconds, then it’s time to get rid of whoever the problem child is because you have to have each others backs,” he said. “When something goes wrong, it goes wrong in a split second so you’re always looking out for one another and have your best guys at the wheel.”

Eating crab was also never allowed on a fishing boat but, “I’ve seen a crab trip into a hot bowling pot of water a time or two,” said Ray. “It just kind of happens.”

Yet it was never about the money.

“It was all about the competition,” said Lethin. “It was the way of life the adventure and it was because I wanted to beat Derrick and he wanted to beat me.”

“It was about the glory and when you got to town and people knew you were number one that season,” agreed Ray. “We beat 250 boats, thats like winning the super bowl for us,” said Ray.

After 32 years spend fishing, Ray has sold all his boats. Now, he and Lethin run tours out of Ketchikan with the Aluetian Ballad, giving tourists a glimpse into commercial fishing and introducing them to different types of sea life up close.