INTERVIEW: Capt. Wild Bill readies for new season of ‘Deadliest Catch’

Deadliest Catch kicks off its 11th season 9 p.m. Tuesday, April 14 with a cutthroat episode that looks at the always treacherous profession of king-crab fishing in the Alaskan Bering Sea. The captains profiled on the show have become household names among reality-TV fans, and one of the most memorable is Capt. Wild Bill Wichrowski.

Easily earning his “wild” nickname, Wichrowski has fished the cold waters off the coast of Alaska for decades. Except for a few years when he ran a sports fishing business in Costa Rica and Mexico, the captain has called the choppy northern waters home and reaped the financial benefits of hard work and determination, despite sometimes biblical odds.

He’s known on the show as a take-no-nonsense leader, someone who prefers greenhornes, or new crew members, to get the job done efficiently and effectively.

In a recent phone interview, Wichrowski said the 11th season will be different because Discovery Channel has “upped the scale of the camera equipment.” So, even though the story lines will be familiar, the visuals should be even more stunning.

“It’s the same every year,” Wichrowski said. “We’re going to have horrible weather. We’re going to have injuries. We’re going to have good fishing. We’re going to have bad fishing. But I think season 11, what Discovery is bringing to this is everybody is going to get a better view of how this all happened. Always we try to raise the bar on how we deliver the program, and I think the video this year is going to be at a higher level, which should bring more emotion to the entire show.”

The captain wouldn’t offer details on how his crew performed in the Bering Sea. Viewers are going to have to tune in for the specifics. However, he did admit to several “complications” that abounded. Some complications in the past have dealt with the captain’s choice of crew members.

“Getting to be one of the hardest parts about the job is finding new people that are qualified, that have the ability to do the job, that are willing to do the job,” he said.

Instead, Wichrowski said he looks for people who need the work and want to turn things around to make some money. He needs people who work “no matter what it takes.”

A successful season on the ocean is one defined by no injuries and no breakages. If these two complications can be avoided, then the boat’s crew will likely make money.

“It might take us a little longer to catch some crab, or we might be up there for a few more days,” he said. “But the goal is to have guys aware, have guys keeping their head in the game so nobody gets nonchalant and somebody gets banged up. I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I’m lucky to say I haven’t had any serious injuries that were related to me. I had one equipment failure thing a few years ago, but it had nothing to do with anything the boat did. We had a piece of equipment fail, and a guy got hit.”

Wichrowski said he left home barely over 17, and he’s been working on the water ever since. He’s been involved in a maritime environment for so long that he has become “calloused” to the fact that he works on holidays.

“It’s been the only employment I’ve known pretty much my entire adult life,” he said, adding that Thanksgiving, a day he often works, is simply another day on the calendar. “I don’t know if it’s good, or it’s a curse. I mean you work on the ocean this many years, you just kind of become calloused to holidays and calloused to being away from friends and family. It’s part of the life. It’s part of the job.”

As far as the camera crew, Wichrowski said he doesn’t “do any stuff that’s made up.” This is actual reality television. “If they say they didn’t get a line or whatever, we’ll come back and redo that,” he said. “That’s just the quality of display. It’s about as close as you can get. You can’t call in stunt waves. You can’t have a pod fly across the deck and knock somebody off their feet. I mean all that stuff happens, and we’re fortunate enough or unfortunate enough, the camera guys are talented enough to catch it on film, and then the others are good enough to display it so we all get to see it. I think we’re more of a reality drama or docudrama than we are a reality show.”

When the captain is off the sea, he’s not exactly resting at home. The celebrity status that has come with his presence on the show has created a busy off-season schedule. Last summer, for example, he visited 27 cities, touring the country and taking part in charity work. “I was in my own bed 22 days last year, so the off-season isn’t really very restful for me,” he said.

Before Wichrowski retires, he would like to see his son, also profiled on Deadliest Catch, take over the wheelhouse. “If you watch the show you’ll know that my son and I have an ongoing battle about his way and my way to how to run a boat, and I’m trying to give him the opportunity to see if his way works,” he said. “For years, I said that I never wanted any of my children in commercial fishing, but that’s when if you had a four-year degree, you had a pretty good job that paid a pretty good wage, but I think as we all know that there’s a lot of people with a lot of secondary education that can’t find a job in their field.”

No matter what the final financial figures might be on a season, Wichrowski seemed honored to take part in this highly exclusive profession that sees so many people walk away in dejection.

“The most rewarding thing for me is when you finish a season on the Bering Sea, it’s an accomplishment that a very small percentage of the people on the planet are able to do,” he said. “I’ll run into people all the time, guys that are 50 years old sitting in a bar-restaurant, smoking a cigarette, telling me that they want a job, and I’ll say I don’t think you can do it. I’m being frank, and they get upset. There are so many people that think they can complete this, but if you watch the show, it’s a small percentage of guys that has the physical and mental capability to complete a season run of the Bering Sea. So if I have a guy that doesn’t want to do it as a long-term career, and he comes up and completes it, and he does his job well, and he goes home with a sense of accomplishment that stays with him for the rest of his life.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

• Deadliest Catch airs 9 p.m. Tuesdays on Discovery Channel. Click here for more information.