Hillstrand is a larger-than-life character but he turns sombre as he talks about the Scandies Rose, a vessel that sank on New Year’s Eve, resulting in the deaths of five crew members, including Captain Gary Cobban Jr and his son. “Jake Anderson, I love him dearly but oh my God, I was tested.”

“Never done that before in a boat,” he sighs. In this season, Hillstrand is also caught in a storm which he describes as, “The strongest storm I’ve been in in 20 years,” and reveals a boat “might run aground”. Johnathan Hillstrand says living in quarantine is a 'cakewalk' compared to life at sea on this season of Deadliest Catch.

Hillstrand says there was so much quality footage of the pair’s antics that the producers didn’t even need the other boats. It’s crazy what happens out there.”īut their partnership has proved successful in terms of content for the show. “It was sort of hard not to micromanage,” he says. Hillstrand says he and Anderson are friends, but it wasn’t easy watching someone else in charge. “No, you couldn’t give me enough money to go out with Wild Bill so I went out with Jake Anderson.” When Hillstrand got the call to return to the show, the producers suggested he join up with ‘Wild’ Bill Wichrowski, captain of Summer Bay, but he baulked at that idea. So in this season of Deadliest Catch, he is out fishing with Jake Anderson on his boat, Saga. Over the course of the series, the Time Bandit almost became a character in itself – it even has its own Wikipedia page – but Hillstrand says the costs and the red tape associated with running the boat became too prohibitive. While Hillstrand is back, his boat isn’t. That necessity is good news for fans who have missed the former captain of the Time Bandit. “Captain’s shares, they’ll take ‘em from you if you don’t use them every couple of years, so I had to come back out.” He figured as he would already be out at sea, why not do the show, too. Part of Hillstrand’s reason for heading out to the Bering Sea once more is to retain a fishing quota known as captain’s shares. We don’t keep female crab or little crab and they were doing all that.” We try to keep it sustainable to where we can fish every year. “They’re actually annihilating those crab stocks because they’re not managing it properly, making it sustainable like we do. Hillstrand says that illegal fishing is a problem that has been ongoing for several years.

But this 16th season is a little bit different in that it also explores how illegal fishing by Russian crews affects the Deadliest Catch cast members. Throughout 15 seasons, Deadliest Catch has told the story of the highs, lows and rivalries of the various crews fishing the waters of the Bering Sea. This 30 days at home doing isolation is a cakewalk,” by comparison. “It (being at sea) felt like the longest 30 days. Johnathan Hillstrand from Deadliest Catch

Time bandit crew 2021