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‘Deadliest Catch’ Star Sig Hansen Talks About Returning To Work After Heart Attack: ‘I Would Feel Foolish’

By Aaron Homer
Published on: 05:29 PST, Jun 13, 2017

Deadliest Catch star Sig Hansen has opened up about the near-fatal heart attack he suffered while filming scenes for the popular Discovery Channel series, saying he would be “foolish” to risk another one by working as hard as he used to.

As The Daily Mail reports, on the Season 12 Deadliest Catch finale, which airs later this month, viewers will see the 51-year-old captain of the Northwestern suffer a near-fatal heart attack before their eyes. He was sitting in his captain’s chair, filming with a producer, when he started experiencing symptoms.

“It was a strange heart attack. It wasn’t like you see in the movies. I had this really sharp, sharp pain, like a knife, right behind my chest plate. It just kept pushing, and it was making me more angry.”

Getting angrier isn’t what you’re supposed to do in a heart attack. Getting help is, and that’s just what Sig did: rushed his ship to the nearest port – Dutch Harbor – to be examined. There, doctors told him he’d had a heart attack. He was airlifted to Anchorage. hundreds of miles away.

The scene, which you can see in the video below, was filmed in February 2016. Sig says he told producers, who were at first hesitant to show something so personal and serious as a near-fatal heart attack, that he was OK with his scenes being shown on TV.

Of course, Sig, who shares custody of daughters Mandy and Nina with wife June, is better now, since he’s here to talk about it. That’s the issue with reality TV as sometimes the timeline of the show and what’s actually happening in real life don’t match up, and real life happens long before you see it on TV.

In the year since his heart attack, Sig has had some time to re-evaluate his lifestyle, including his grueling work schedule of crab-fishing in the merciless waters of the Bering Sea.

Returning to the site of his heart attack, Sig revealed to producers that he believes it would be “foolish” to “go up there and push [his] luck.”

So does that mean that Sig is giving up crab fishing for good, or just that he’s going to try to find a way to take it a little bit easier? It’s difficult to say for certain, but on his Twitter account, Sig teases that he’s been working on ways to keep his stress level down. And on June 2, he tweeted, “It ain’t easy.”

New episodes of Deadliest Catch air on Tuesdays at 9:00 p.m. Eastern time on The Discovery Channel.

[Featured Image by Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images]

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