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Deadliest Catch isn’t like other reality shows. Just ask longtime narrator Mike Rowe. He’s admitted that he didn’t know exactly what he was getting into when he agreed to work on the Discovery Channel series. But when a tragic disaster occurred while filming the first season, it brought home exactly how real this reality series was. 

Mike Rowe recalled the ‘chaos’ of filming ‘Deadliest Catch’ Season 1 

Side-by-side images of Mike Rowe on the Tonight Show in 2007 and of the F/V Aleutian Lady crashing through the waves on Deadliest Catch
[L-R] Mike Rowe in 2007; The F/V Aleutian Lady | Paul Drinkwater/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images; Discovery Channel

“Twelve years ago, I was in Dutch Harbor, shooting the first season of Deadliest Catch,” Rowe recalled in a 2017 Facebook post. “Originally, I had been asked to host the show, and frankly, I had no idea how to do such a thing.” 

“No one really understood what the show was back then, or what it would ultimately become,” he added. “Sometimes it felt like a reality show, sometimes a documentary. Mostly, we were just trying to capture the drama and the difficulty of fishing for Alaskan King Crab.”

Filming “was chaos,” Rowe recalled. “Fascinating, unforgettable chaos.” The days were long and intense, so he was glad when he was finally able to retreat to his hotel room for some much-needed rest. Then, one of his producers woke him up to deliver some terrible news. A boat called had gone down, and its entire crew was missing. 

“I can’t begin to tell you what a wake-up call that was,” he wrote. 

The tragedy was ‘unreal,’ the ‘Deadliest Catch’ host recalled 

Until then, Rowe had built “an invisible wall” to cope with the danger of filming the show. That wall “makes you feel impervious, when you’re really not. It makes you feel safe, when [you] really aren’t,” he shared.

But when the F/V Big Valley sank in the Bering Sea in January 2005, the Dirty Jobs host was forced to confront the dangerous reality of crab fishing. 

“I remember how I felt when it finally sunk in that six men had actually gone into the water. ‘Wait – what the hell? That was not in the script!’ I remember how I felt when it became clear that five of those men were lost forever. It felt so unreal,” he wrote. 

Years later, Rowe again confronted the risks that crab fishermen take to do their jobs when another boat, the F/V Destination, sank. The February 2017 disaster cost six crewmembers their lives and was addressed on Deadliest Catch. 

‘Deadliest Catch’ is more than just a reality show 

A crew member wrangling a crab pot on 'Deadliest Catch' Season 20
‘Deadliest Catch’ | Discovery Channel

While no ship on Deadliest Catch has experienced a disaster as devastating as those that befell the Destination and the Big Valley, risk is ever present. Several cast members have been seriously injured. One, Todd Kochutin, died in 2021 after an accident with a crab pot. But to viewers at home, the danger might seem distant or abstract.

“[I]t’s still so easy to forget that Deadliest Catch is not a ‘reality show;’ but rather, a show about reality,” Rowe wrote. “And it’s still a shock to see how rudely ‘reality’ can shake me awake.” 

“It also strikes me, that for all our efforts to eliminate risk from our daily lives, there are still places on the planet where risk can never be removed – where life can never be scripted,” he added. “The Bering Sea is one such place – a place where men of great courage show up to work every day, and confront a level of danger that most of us will never encounter.”

Deadliest Catch Season 20 airs Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET/PT on Discovery Channel. Episodes also stream on Max. 

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