"They just drove a lot of the boats to the dock, dropped the keys at the harbormaster's office, and took the next plane to Seattle," says Rick Lauber, who was the chairman of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council from 1991 until 2001. With nothing to catch, the huge fleet of crab boats foundered. Then, in 1983, king crab populations in Alaska collapsed. Suddenly, any American with a boat could get a piece of the action, and Yankee ingenuity ran wild. coastline, declaring a 200-mile-wide band of ocean as an Exclusive Economic Zone, and eventually kicking out foreign vessels. In 1976, Congress asserted American control over the waters off the U.S. Yet at the same time, no pursuit has so dramatically shown the catastrophic downside of such magical thinking. With that conviction has come a sort of jackpot mentality, the notion that vast, fishy riches lie beneath the ocean's surface, waiting for any bold fisherman with a good boat and a little luck. More than any other realm of modern human endeavor, commercial fishing has been fired with a belief in the limitlessness of the planet's natural bounty. Yet even as the tide rises for catch shares, the fleet and the crews in the Bering Sea are still contending with far-reaching aftereffects - something not seen on TV, and not much discussed by catch-share boosters. Jane Lubchenco, the marine biologist who now heads the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (which manages the nation's fisheries) has launched a concerted effort to institute catch-share programs in as many U.S. Many more, including a major groundfish fishery on the West Coast and one in New England, are now following suit. Today, fisheries for everything from fish-stick staples like whiting and pollock to high-end delicacies like halibut and sablefish operate under "catch share" programs. ![]() But the fishery there is just one ripple in the tide of a revolution that has swept the fishing world over the past 20 years. In the Bering Sea today, the race for crab is now over. "The whole dynamic of the fishery has changed," says Kale Garcia, another longtime crab fisherman, who owns a boat called the Aquila. You'd never know it from watching the show, but only one season after it hit TV screens, crab fishermen in Alaska began fishing under a new system that permanently divided up the annual catch between all the boats in the fishery. For years, crab fishing in the Bering Sea was the deadliest job in the country - more likely to kill you than going on foot patrol in Iraq.īut even as the Deadliest Catch rocketed to popularity, the hard lessons of two decades of racing for fish were finally sinking in for fishermen in the Bering Sea, and they were voluntarily agreeing to end the race. That free-for-all brought a host of problems, from environmental damage caused by carpet-bombing the ocean floor with crab pots, to bankruptcies and a chilling roster of lost fishermen and boats that sank after they ventured out into fierce storms so they wouldn't get left behind in the race. "You could've had 25 boats easily catching the whole quota," says Edward Poulsen, a second-generation Bering Sea crab fisherman. Though it's not much discussed on the show, the scramble for crab is just a videogenic symptom of a larger - and potentially catastrophic - problem in fishing: Too many boats chasing too few fish. But if there's a single secret ingredient behind the show's success, it is the drama of the multimillion-dollar fishing derby - starring the likes of Phil Harris, spitting blood and tearing his hair out as his boat gradually falls apart around him, and Johnathan Hillstrand, like a Hells Angel behind the wheel of the Time Bandit - to catch as many crabs as possible before the government drops the checkered flag on the season. Granted, the weekly drama of the Red Bull-guzzling, cigarette-huffing, bleepity-bleeping captains doing battle with 13 million pounds of king crab does give the show a certain NASCAR-worthy je ne sais quoi. Yet the show has somehow won over more than 4 million viewers and garnered five seasons of red-hot ratings. ![]() Pulling load after load of crustaceans off the bottom of the ocean seems like pretty thin stuff for a runaway entertainment phenomenon. ![]() It's hard to put a finger on what drives the wild popularity of Deadliest Catch, the Discovery Channel's series about crab fishing in the Bering Sea.
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