A Broken Centrifuge Separator Drives Captain Jake Anderson To The Brink | Deadliest Catch

Stuck at the Dock: Captain Jake Anderson Battles Time, Breakdowns, and Homesickness

For Captain Jake Anderson, the sea has always been both a calling and a curse. But during this year’s king crab season, frustration is replacing the thrill of the catch.

“I just want to go home, you know?” Jake confesses, voice worn and heavy. “My guys want to go home. It’s frustrating when you can’t move forward, and you’re not making money—stuck at the dock with engine repairs for the past 10 days.”

His boat, stranded in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, is bleeding both time and money. The King crab season is slipping away, and with it, tens of thousands of dollars. “We’ve lost another 30 or 40 grand, I think,” Jake estimates. “It’s hard on everybody. Everyone’s getting fed up. It’s time to go fishing.”

While his boat sits idle, Jake feels the personal cost of life at sea begin to weigh heavier than ever. “I was on my phone doing business, and he crawls up to get my attention… Doesn’t even feel like I really have a son or a family anymore. I’ve been gone so long.”

Every day stuck at port is a hit to morale. “People think we like being cold and tired and hungry,” Jake says, “but we’re just normal people. We don’t like any of that. We just want to be home with our families. And we can’t. That’s the hardest part of this job—being away.”

Down in the engine room, the crew is fighting a losing battle. The culprit? A faulty centrifuge—a vital piece of equipment designed to separate water from fuel. Without it, the fuel supply gets contaminated, risking engine failure and possibly disaster at sea.

“I just put that thing back together,” one of the crew mutters in frustration. “We got to have somebody come look at it or we’re going to replace it.”

But there’s no time to waste. Jake makes a desperate call: “We’re just going to buy every fuel filter in Dutch Harbor and change them out constantly. Every three hours if we have to. Just watch the gauges—if it drops at all, change it.”

It’s a risky, expensive workaround, but it might be their only shot. “It’s the price you pay to stay alive,” Jake says. With cases of filters stacked aboard, the boat finally leaves the harbor.

After 18 long days, they drop pots. “Could just end up being a bunch of blanks,” someone mutters. But the ocean answers back with promise: “Sixty-six!” a crewman shouts. Cheers erupt across the deck. It’s a rare moment of triumph.

Among the crew is veteran engineer Ole Helge, age 64, who joins the deck crew for the first time in decades. “He’s our good luck charm,” someone jokes. As pots fill with crab, hope returns to the faces on board.

But no amount of crab can replace the time Jake has lost. “I miss my wife. I miss my son Aiden. I missed his first step,” he says quietly. “That’s the life of a fisherman. You can make all the money in the world, but you can never get that time back.”