Deadliest Catch Captain Josh Harris isn’t taking any chances when it comes to bad luck.
The head of the Cornelia Marie took some pretty drastic measures in Tuesday’s episode to cleanse the vessel of “bad juju” after a string of dangerous mishaps and struggles to locate the crab piles they needed to meet their quota.
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The source of the bad luck, Harris hypothestized, is a gross old t-shirt worn almost always by greenhorn Taylor Jensen.
“Isn’t that the same shirt you’ve whacked your head in twice? That shirt is bad juju, just talking about it…it was already fighting back and that shirt has got to go,” Harris told Jensen.
Looking back, the young fisherman has suffered a number of freak accidents this season, getting hit in the head with a 30-lb. steel hook just a few weeks ago by a fellow deckhand. He was a little bloodied, but otherwise OK. Then this week, while throwing pots overboard, a fellow deckhand encircled him with the line, which, had it tightened, could have killed him or knocked him overboard.
“I’ve never had a big [accident] on my watch, and I don’t want to,” Harris told the cameras. “I want to make it through unscathed. … I feel like a one-legged man in an a— kicking contest.”
So despite it being a little silly, Harris, Casey McManus and the rest of the Cornelia Marie crew decide to burn the offending shirt.
But the shirt definitely gave up a little bit of a fight, failing to catch flame immediately. “The bad luck does not want to disappear,” he said, “Kinda just hanging on for life, isn’t it?”
Eventually, however, the flames took the shirt, and whatever bad energy it was holding onto, into the sea. As the crew erupted in cheer, fans had to wonder if that was the last of the Cornelia Marie’s bad luck.
This is Harris’ first season back on the sea after taking time off last year to tend to a family matter.
Prior to the season premiere, Harris told PopCulture.com exclusively that it felt good to be back where he belonged on the boat.
“It feels pretty good,” he told PopCulture. “I’m just happy to be fishing again. It’s just a beautiful thing. I had to take some time off there, lost my grandfather, so I took all last year off, and yeah, that kind of sucked. But I’m back in the saddle again, I feel pretty good about it, and things are going well.”
He also alluded to the difficulties his crew has been facing this season.
“Well I picked one hell of a season to come back to,” Harris told PopCulture. “You know, we had this supermoon event and it caused all these massive tides, which in turn meant we had a lot of injuries and a lot of craziness, and it was hard to catch crab and all this random stuff that’s happened this year.”
He continued, “But as far as I know, everyone has all their toes and all their fingers on my boat. I’m pretty sure.”
DeadliestCatch airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET on Discovery.
Photo credit: Discovery
