‘Deadliest Catch’ crew visits county fair

By Claudia Lamar

Becoming a county fair attraction may not be foreseen when first embarking on a crab-fishing career, but it is rapidly becoming familiar ground to the Discovery Channel’s “Deadliest Catch” crew of the Wizard.

Present for the opening day of the Amador County Fair were crew members of the 155-foot fishing vessel, Captain Monte Colburn, Engineer Lenny Lekanoff and Deckhand Lynn Guitard.

For the landlocked town of Plymouth, the celebrity crew hit the fair like a rogue wave, participating in the morning Kids’ Parade, posing for pictures, and answering questions in the Benny Brown Arena about the show and their time at sea.

Colburn, grandson of Amador County Fair founder Harold Colburn, grew up in South Lake Tahoe, but spent many summers in Plymouth and is familiar with the fairgrounds. He was looking forward to taking in the sights with crew members Lekanoff and Guitard, who were both visiting from Olympia, Wash.

“I’ve seen the fair many times in the past, but they have not,” said Colburn. “We’re making it a point to see the old engines, and the sawmill and the stamp mill, … maybe go see some of the livestock, just kind of cruise around.”

While the fishermen may have been freewheeling around in Amador County July 28, their real-life work is no day at the fair. The “Deadliest Catch,” notorious for the unpredictable nature and high risk involved with the profession, films crews aboard five or more fishing vessels during two of the most dangerous Alaskan crab fishing seasons — the King Crab and Snow Crab seasons.

The show, which has just finished airing its seventh season, featured the Wizard crew for five of those seasons, and remains rated the No. 1 Tuesday primetime cable program, and No. 2 in all television programming for men ages 25 to 54.

While Colburn and Lekanoff have made life-long careers out of crab fishing, with each of them bringing more than 25 years of experience to the boat, 26-year-old Guitard began his fishing career just four years ago, in front of the cameras.

“It was pretty nerve-racking,” Guitard confessed. “Being that with the job itself, you have to prove yourself, but then you got half of the world watching. It just adds a lot of pressure to make it.”

Not many are as lucky as Guitard, who started off like most newcomers —  a greenhorn.

“When you first get on a crab boat, you don’t know anything,” Colburn said. “You’re probably puking sick, and you’re miserable. You’re a greenhorn and basically do whatever … you’re told the whole time. I think probably 90 out of 100 fail. The failure rate is incredibly high for a lot of reasons. I think the conditions — diet, sleep, the work — it all adds up to where most people can’t deal with it. After seven to ten days you get to town, and you get rid of them.”

Unsure if their ship will be picked up for another season, the crew, which spends six months of the year on the boat, working 18- to 24-hour shifts, is preparing to sail back out to the chilling and often violent waters of the Bering Sea Sept. 20. Once there, the Wizard, along with its fishermen, will remain in the water until Thanksgiving, and return once again after the new year for the snow crab season that ends in the spring.

“In October, we have King Crab. If they’ll have us again this fall, they’ll send a crew up in the first part of October to get the boat ready with mounted cameras, and that’s when you get to know your cameramen,” said Lekanoff, who admits to being camera-shy. “I have a reputation with cameramen. They’re warned about me, so they stay out of my way. Or they approach me lightly.”

With so much of their daily lives filmed, the crew knows the ropes when it comes to being edited for entertainment.

“One thing about the show, is we don’t get to say or have an idea how it’s going to air,” said Colburn. “You get washed across the deck, that’s going to make the show. You get screamed at, that’s going to make the show. A lot of stuff, 99 percent of the film, probably will hit the floor. Sometimes they don’t portray you in the way you would like to be seen, but they don’t make stuff up. They have the footage, and they just put it together pretty much how they want.”

With the successful ratings of the show in the United States and overseas, where it is broadcast in more than 130 countries, it’s apparent that what the audience wants is danger. The biggest injury to date aboard the Wizard remains a wave that hit in season 5, leaving Colburn with broken ribs and Guitard with a black eye and contusion.

“Most injuries are bumps and bruises, and you just have to work through it,” said Colburn. “There’s no medical element on the boat at all. We have a little bit of first aid training, but that’s about it, so we kind of just have to rely on our own devices. … This last season, Lenny split his elbow open and my brother, Captain Keith, sewed it up. More often than not, we are two or three days out to sea. If someone’s got a broken limb, it’s going to be a long ride for everybody.”

With no shortage of risk, little entertainment on the ship and round-the-clock shifts, sometimes the only light on the horizon for the crew is the two-day boat ride back to deliver their catch.

“Towards the end of the trip, everybody’s tired and kind of grumpy,” Colburn said. “The only real break you get is when you take that boat ride back to town … that’s when you’re getting caught up on your sleep or getting your stateroom cleaned. There’s always something to do, but that trip to town is the only rest you have.

“It’s a different lifestyle,” added Colburn. “Being gone in the middle of the ocean for six months out of the year, you pay a heavy price doing that, but then the other six months you’re off, and not a lot of people have that.”

When asked to comment about the success of the show, and the mass appeal it has for men specifically, Colburn responded, “I think for a lot of people that work in an office, or something along those lines, they might not have much adventure in their life. And then if you look at what we do, every time we pull away from the dock, we don’t know what’s going to happen. Any number of things could happen. … There’s a lot of adventure involved.”

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