'Deadliest Catch' crew says fishing isn't that glamorous

"Rule number one is stay on the boat, and rule number two is to keep the water on the outside of the boat, always," said Newberry, who stars in the hit reality series "The Deadliest Catch."

"If you become too complacent it will kill you," he said.

Newberry and Travis Lofland, a deckhand on the Wizard, who also is featured on the Discovery Channel show, were in Juneau for several days and met with fans and signed autographs at the Alaskan Brewing Co.

"The Deadliest Catch," in its fifth season, has become a huge commercial success that depicts the king and opilio crab fishing seasons in the treacherous Bering Sea.

While it's cool being on a hit television series, crab fishing is not a glamorous job, Lofland said.

"It's probably one of the most miserable existences you can have in the middle of 'opie' season," he said. "It's cold, you're beating ice and it's just a miserable existence."

And the job is dangerous too, as the show's title suggests. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics consistently ranks fishing as one of the most deadly jobs in the country.

"Ten years ago when I was out there, my greenhorn year, my deck boss got knocked off a stack and we never recovered him," Lofland said. "So that will scare ... you."

Newberry, a lifelong resident of Homer, has had his fair share of dangerous experiences in a crab fishing career that spans nearly 30 years. During the opilio season in January 2000, he was working on the Debra D when a rogue wave hit the boat while he was sleeping, shifting 10,000 pounds of bait from the port side to starboard, causing the vessel to list on its side at a 35-degree angle.

"I come flying out of my bunk, running to the wheelhouse because the skipper was up there," Newberry said. "I'm going up there and I hear the skipper say, 'Wow, I've never seen the boat do this before.' That's the last thing that anyone wants to hear a skipper say."

The crew was able to take the crane on the port side and took three crab pots and hung them over like a downrigger, gaining enough leverage to pull the boat's rail out of the water so they could dump the bait and gear in order to save the boat, and likely their lives.

"For about three hours it was a hair-raising, nasty experience," Newberry said. "I mean scared-scared. ... It is a sinking feeling when your boat is sinking."

Lofland said experience does diminish the fear factor, to some degree.

"Actually, big weather now is kind of fun, as twisted as that may sound," he said. "You know you're alive -- big waves, big weather and everything's happening."

When the big weather comes, Lofland said he goes into the zone.

"It's not scary in the aspect of being scared to walk out on deck and do the job, but I like to refer to it as 'pucker-factor high,'" he said. "There are definitely those moments. You get washed out by a wave (and) you know you're alive, for sure."

Newberry, in his third season on the show, said it's not a burden having the film crew onboard while fishing.

"... When we get these guys on board, the first thing I do is tell them, 'Look, your mother is not here. We're trying to accomplish a goal here. We're trying to work. You're trying to work. Safety is our first concern here.' "

And while the show does a good job of portraying what it's like to be a crab fisherman in the Bering Sea, it can't make people feel what it's really like, Newberry said.

"As far as the work is concerned, it's not that the work is so hard, it's just how hard can you work when you are absolutely bone-tired," he said. "That's what you don't see on the TV. You know we're tired, but you don't feel it, you don't get any of the smells. It's very two-dimensional when you're watching it on TV."

Newberry said it's been a great opportunity to be on a hit TV series but he doesn't have any intentions of going Hollywood and moving out of Alaska.

"Now the show has exploded and some people call me a celebrity, but I just try to remain myself and keep with Alaska stuff and remember where I come from," he said.