In addition to showcasing the wide variety of commercial fishing, "Deadliest Catch: Bloodline" is a moving tribute to Josh Harris' father, the late Captain Phil Harris. As fans of the spin-off series know, Josh Harris and Casey McManus use the veterans' charts to map a course in Hawaii. "My dad was a legend on the Bering Sea. When he died, he left me a mystery," Harris says with gravitas in the series' promo. "If I can carry on the old man's torch, it'll be worth it."
In reality, the seed for the idea originally had far less gravitas. When Harris came across a cache of his dad's fishing charts from the '80s while remodeling the Cornelia Marie, he joked that they would be fun to investigate. "I was like, 'Yeah, let's go find these spots out here and check it out, you know, it's warm too!'" he told Sig Hansen in an interview from around the time of the spin-off's initial debut. "We were joking and then a couple days later I was on a plane and we started to go check it out, and I didn't really know what we were getting ourselves into or what we were going to find."
Though the series may have started as a joke, Harris now feels right at home in Hawaii. "I could definitely see myself getting a place in Hawaii and fishing that out for months at a time," he told TV Shows Ace. "There's a lot of money to be made."
