Johnathan Hillstrand was forced into an emergency resupply run aboard the Time Bandit after the vessel’s freezer failed during the May 29 episode, turning a working fishing trip into a race against spoiled bait, ruined food and lost time.
The failure hit hard. The crew lost 5,000 pounds of bait and 500 pounds of perishable food, and a return to Dutch Harbor for fuel and supplies would have cost three days of fishing and $20,000 in fuel. Instead of heading all the way back, Hillstrand took the boat to St. George Island, a place with just 28 residents, and Teddy got the Freon for the ice box so the crew could keep the refrigeration system alive.
That stop mattered because the Time Bandit could not afford to sit idle. The crew also secured a big caribou to help them get through the next three weeks, a small but important buffer for a boat already carrying the pressure of a season where the payoff could reach into seven figures. The emergency fix did not solve everything, but it kept the boat fishing when a longer detour would have drained both time and money.
That urgency sat beside the rest of the episode’s grind. Rick Shelford was pushing the Aleutian Lady into an area that had not really been fished for decades, setting 30 pots amid the threat of 20-foot seas before running into engine trouble tied to the Racor fuel filter. His crew found the problem and kept going. Across the water, Jake Anderson had already moved off 100 pounds of king crab and into Bairdi on the Cornelia Marie, then tried to pull crab to his side in the West boundary while Sig Hansen triple baited to peel them away.
The competition turned sharp when Anderson told his crew to gut two pots, weld them together and throw them back, prompting Hansen to say they were trying to overpower him. Hansen still put up big crab numbers to the tune of 200, but Anderson’s plan of setting pots on both sides of the line paid off too, with full pots and other boats bailing. For the Time Bandit, the freeze-up on deck was the kind of failure that can sink a trip. Hillstrand found a way around it, and that may have been the difference between salvaging the season and watching it evaporate with the bait.
