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THE ASTORIAN • SATURDAY, APRIL 16, 2022
Bend man to be featured on ‘Deadliest Catch’
By JOE SIESS
The Bulletin
When Capt. Rip Carlton
was just a lad, he dreamed of
swashbuckling adventures.
Skiing mountains, hitchhik-
ing in Mexico, racing cars in
Europe. But he was broke.
That’s when he left his
home in Seattle for Dutch
Harbor, Alaska, where, at the
age of 18, he lived in a tent
he pitched inside an aban-
doned military barracks.
From there, he combed the
harbor looking for work on
one of the many fi shing ves-
sels moored at the docks.
He got his foot in the
door of the lucrative fi sh-
ing industry and proved he
was worth his salt, working
his way up from bait boy,
to deck hand, engineer, and
eventually to captain.
Today, the 64-year-old
Carlton lives in Bend with
his wife, Cindy King Carl-
ton, but is a captain of two
ships in Alaska he uses to
catch king crab. It’s a pro-
fession he loves but never
expected he would wind up
doing this long. He’s worked
in the fi shing industry for 46
years, 35 years as captain,
and has fi elded numerous
requests from the Discovery
Channel to allow a fi lm crew
to capture him and his crew
in action for the network’s
popular show, “Deadliest
Catch.”
He resisted for the lon-
gest time, and it wasn’t
until his son, Derek Carlton,
fi nally convinced his father
to say yes, and so he will
be featured, along with his
crew on the Patricia Lee, in
the upcoming season of the
show airing on Tuesday .
“They’ve asked me and
my boat to do it for quite a
few years,” Carlton said of
the “Deadliest Catch.” “And
I’ve always said no ... I
really didn’t have the desire
to do it.”
The journey from a youth
in search of adventure to the
“Deadliest Catch” all started
in the 1970s when Carlton,
Ryan Brennecke/The Bulletin
Capt. Rip Carlton and his crew will be featured in the upcoming season of ‘Deadliest Catch’ on
the Discovery Channel.
who is truly a ski bum at
heart, wanted to drive race
cars in Europe. That’s when
he caught wind of Alaska,
the fi shing industry and the
big payouts that come with a
hefty haul.
“I didn’t know anything
about fi shing, and I mean
anything,” Carlton said. “I
knew nothing.”
When Carlton got his
start, he was doing fac-
tory work in Alaska while
he searched for a job on a
boat. He wound up unload-
ing shrimp, and going out on
king crab fi shing trips. Even-
tually he got on to a Norwe-
gian fi shing vessel, which
took him back to Seattle.
After two months work-
ing on the boat in Seattle,
he took his paycheck from
the Norwegians and bought
a one-way ticket back to
Alaska.
“I had a backpack, a
sleeping bag, a loaf of bread,
and peanut butter and jelly,”
Carlton said. “Because there
were no restaurants. There
was nowhere to stay up there
at the time, and I lived on the
beach for four weeks, in an
abandoned barracks from
World War II.”
He pitched his tent inside
the barracks and used a rock
and some rusty nails to ham-
mer plastic over a window
that overlooked Dutch Har-
bor. When it got really cold,
he burned things in a 55-gal-
lon drum.
Once he got back on a
boat, he couldn’t get enough
of the adventure, and the
paychecks.
While the job is lucrative,
and exciting, it comes with
an element of danger. Carl-
ton said he and his crew fi sh
in harsh conditions roughly
200 to 600 miles away from
the nearest town.
“You are working on the
ocean in the winter, right in
the middle of the Bering Sea,
which that in itself is danger-
ous,” Carlton said. “We get
huge currents. We get even
more wind. And where we
fi sh around these islands is
all rocky, craggy ... It’s just
unbelievable the weather we
work in and what we do to
get the job done.”
Carlton told of one close
call while out on the sea
fi shing.
“I was driving a 165-foot
boat and the wheel house
was three stories up,” Carl-
ton said. “And we took such
a big wave, the wave came
through the wheelhouse
windows, came through
with so much force it was
like a bomb blowing up.
“Then the back door got
blown off the door hinges,
the whole boat fl ooded up to
the wheel house. The guys
were three stories down eat-
ing breakfast when it hap-
pened, and they thought I
was dead because the boat
just blew up,” Carlton said.
“But I ducked, I saw the
wave coming and I ducked
down and it went right over
my head through the win-
dows and out the back win-
dows and out the back door.”
The monstrous wave
knocked out most of the
equipment on board, Carlton
said. Carlton and his crew
set up the plexiglass storm
windows kept on board for
exactly this kind of scenario.
While not entirely ideal con-
ditions, the storm windows
gave Carlton a chance to
check the steering and lights
on the ship, which were still
intact. He also fetched his
emergency radio from his
stateroom.
The voice on the other
end of the radio asked Carl-
ton if everything was OK,
and what he and his crew
needed after a close call with
the giant wave.
“Do you have any more
bait?” Carlton asked over
the radio. “Bait?” the voice
on the other end responded
in confusion.
Carlton said he and
his crew needed the bait
to keep fi shing despite
almost becoming fi sh food
themselves.
Situations like these
are common in the fi sh-
ing industry, Carlton said,
and the upcoming season
of “Deadliest Catch” is a
chance to catch a glimpse
of what goes into getting the
king crab legs from the sea
to the buff et table.
“When you see the show,
you won’t even believe it,”
Carlton said.
Carlton and his family
plan to invite their friends
over to their home in Bend
to celebrate and watch the
season premiere . To keep
an eye on Carlton while he’s
out at sea, follow him on
Instagram, rip_carlton.
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