'Catch'-ing with the Ice Pack

By LillyKat
PTR Senior Staff Writer

Since I've been talking about the moving of cheese this week - a joking reference to the book Who Moved My Cheese?, which was "required" reading at my former job to tell all us cubicle-ites how to deal with change - I'd like to say that our Deadliest Catch team saw their cheese moved this week, too.

Or, I should say, they actually decided to move their own cheese given one big mother of an ice pack decided to jump onto the express lane and close in on the fishing grounds ASAP.

Got to love winter on the Bering Sea, eh?

Don't Make Me Get All Captain on Your Arse: Did you see it? Sorta? Kinda? Almost? I think it was there. I do believe I finally saw Time Bandit Captain Andy Hillstrand get irked. Shocker! Okay ... not really. One of the reasons I like the Hillstrand Brothers is because they are so even-tempered by comparison to ... uh, others. But Andy's brief - and I do mean brief - rant was deserving (can we even call it a rant? it was more like a talking to). His crew DID drop the ball in forgetting to assign someone to monitor the offload weighing, which promptly resulted in the loss of about 5,000 pounds of crab (approx. $8,000). Read: missing. Ooops.

PTSD: I'm wondering how the Wizard's Captain Keith can be back out fishing so soon after his tarp debacle that almost saw three of his guys killed. I'm all for getting back up on the horse after falling off, but he is a bit of nervous wreck, eh? And that energy isn't helping the crew much. Cripes, if it were me, I think I would've crawled into a hole for the winter. Then again, he's got a quota to meet and money to make. Nothing like desperation as a motivating factor to get over your s**t.

Just By The Hair on Your Chinny Chin Chin: So, what are the odds the Cornelia Marie will actually make it into St. Paul before being frozen in place by the fast approaching ice pack? Captain Phil scores HUGE numbers of crab, races to pull up his pots and head for shelter FROM the ice pack cometh only to run smack dab IN to the ice pack cometh. Argh. And with the Murray Replacement Greenhorn (MPG) barely patching the circulation pipe leak back together, the CM needs to not find itself surrounded.

Would the Real Sig Hansen Please Stand Up: So, this is the second week in a row the Northwestern's Captain Sig is happy. Content. On the crab. Just minding his own beeswax. I'm sorry, who are you and what have you done with the real Sig Hansen? (Love ya', Sig, but I've never seen you THIS content).

New episodes of Deadliest Catch air Tuesdays at 9 p.m. on Discovery Channel. Visit the official Deadliest Catch Web site for the latest on the captains and crews of the Northwestern, Cornelia Marie, Time Bandit, Wizard, Early Dawn and North American and the new boat, the Incentive. You can also catch up with Deadliest Catch folks on Twitter: fvnw_erin / CaptPhilHarris / northwesternpat / NorthwesternPR / captjohnathan / northwesternsig / DeadliestCatch (which is actually the Cornelia Marie) / DiscoveryChPR.