Deadliest Catch

- Season 8

(2012)

Early October 2011 and the Blue & Red King Crab season starts on the Bering Sea.

With the fleet split, a tale of two fisheries emerges. On the Blue grounds, a captains' bet has the boats jockeying for position. On the Red grounds, a returning veteran quickly proves his worth, while another boat copes with a fallen deckhand.

As the fleet grinds through injuries and mental mistakes, the Bering Sea exposes soft spots and weak links in each crew. While the skippers wonder which deckhands have the right stuff, the Time Bandit says goodbye to a crewmate who never made it back.

Across the Bering Sea crab fleet, bad fishing causes high tensions and low morale as empty pots whittle away profits and nerves among the men.

Past the halfway point of the King Crab season, man and machine alike show signs of wear under the brutal hand of the Bering Sea. While repairs can be made to the equipment, the fishermen must dig deep to soldier on in a place where nature rules.

As king crab season nears the finish line, the crew of The Wizard faces a life or death situation as a deckhand collapses and struggles to hold on. Catching crab suddenly becomes secondary to a fight for survival on the harsh Bering Sea.

Midway through the winter crab season and the Bering sea is taking its toll on the boats and the men. The northern most boats are in a race to save their gear as the polar icepack descends onto the fishing grounds.

In the aftermath of an arctic hurricane, the fleet struggles to reach the finish line of a brutal king crab season. Poor fishing and quarreling crews make this final push a painful one for every man on the Bering Sea.

It's winter in Dutch Harbor and the fleet prepares to hunt Opilio crab. The season looks promising with the quota up and the price high, but tensions rise before the lines are thrown as one deckhand quits, two brothers fight and one goes overboard.

With unrelenting northerly winds bearing down on the fleet, every skipper steels himself for battle with the descending polar ice pack. And as temperatures drop on the grounds, tempers on deck flare up.

Across the fleet, captains battle the descending polar ice pack to save their pots, and it's a losing war. The Northwestern and Wizard struggle to escape St. Paul harbor, while the rest of the fleet scrambles to keep their opilio season alive.

The Captains explore their own legacies as they swap stories of the legends of the Bering Sea. Elliot squares off with his boat's owner. Jake and Josh Harris compare what they learned as deckhands on the Time Bandit and the Northwestern.

Life at home is more complicated than life at sea. This explosive episode deals with Jake Anderson's murdered father, Jake Harris' addiction, and Elliot's disintegrating home life.

The captains discuss their strategies for dealing with the red crab quota and the brutal ice. Elliot and Junior settle their wager. Keith comes face to face with his most disgruntled Greenhorn yet.

There is an unwritten code of ethics in the Bering Sea. Junior and Elliot settle the score about their long-simmering feud. Josh Harris looks back at far he's come in a year.

In this special two-hour close to a merciless opilio season, a veteran deckhand pays for a mistake in flesh. Then in the final hours some men rise and some men fall, but not everyone will make it home.