Deadliest Catch: Crewman’s Near-Miss Eye Injury on F/V Wizard Highlights Perils of Bering Sea Crab Fishing

Bering Sea, Alaska – September 19, 2025 – The Bering Sea’s relentless fury took center stage in a heart-stopping moment on Discovery Channel’s Deadliest Catch, as a crewman aboard the F/V Wizard narrowly escaped a catastrophic injury during a high-stakes crab haul. Just 460 miles north of Dutch Harbor, the 109-foot F/V Seabrooke and the storied 164-foot Wizard pushed their crews to the brink in pursuit of blue crab, battling exhaustion, injuries, and the ever-present threat of disaster. On the Wizard, a harrowing accident left engineer Lenny Lechenov bloodied and stunned, his face sliced open by a rogue crab pot block, missing his eye by mere inches. Meanwhile, on the Seabrooke, deck boss Aaron Steiner grappled with a potentially life-threatening infection, underscoring why crab fishing remains one of the deadliest professions in the world. As Season 21 unfolds, airing Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET, these incidents remind viewers of the razor-thin margin for error on the high seas.

Aboard the Seabrooke, Captain Scott Campbell Jr., a veteran known for his relentless drive, was riding a hot streak, stuffing his tanks with blue crab to meet a looming delivery deadline. With only 20,000 pounds left to haul, he pushed his crew beyond their limits, operating on just three hours of sleep over three grueling days. “This is what separates the men from the boys in this fishery,” Campbell declared, urging his team to move faster. But the toll was evident, particularly for deck boss and engineer Aaron Steiner, whose knee swelled painfully, signaling trouble. “It’s progressively getting worse,” Steiner admitted, limping across the deck. Campbell’s inspection revealed a hot, swollen knee—a telltale sign of a staph infection. “You got an infection, dude. This is not anything we want to joke with,” Campbell warned, his urgency palpable. Without immediate antibiotics, a staph infection can spread rapidly, risking organ failure or worse. To Steiner’s dismay, the boat’s antibiotic supply was empty, a critical oversight that left the crew vulnerable. “Steiner’s the deck boss, the engineer. Him going down would be devastating,” Campbell lamented, highlighting the precarious balance of health and productivity at sea.

Meanwhile, the Wizard, under Captain Keith Colburn’s command, faced its own trials. After a four-day cold streak, Colburn revived an old boat tradition to shift their luck, desperate to fill their tanks with 100,000 pounds of blue crab. A falling-out with ally Captain Scott Campbell Jr.—stemming from a betrayed fishing hotspot deal—had soured their prospects, but a promising haul of 17 crabs per pot signaled a turnaround. “We’re on the meat now,” Colburn cheered, dubbing the Wizard a “magical crab boat.” The celebration was short-lived, however, as disaster struck during a routine pot haul. As the crab block hoisted a pot, the buoy snapped free, slamming into engineer Lenny Lechenov’s face. “Man down!” the crew shouted, rushing to his side. Blood gushed from a gash near his eye, and Colburn, assessing the injury, noted, “It’s definitely bleeding like a face wound, but it’s so close to your eye.” Lechenov, dazed but resilient, confirmed he could see, a small mercy given the proximity to his eyeball. “Real fortunate. Lucky,” Colburn said, applying butterfly bandages to close the wound, wary of stitching so close to the eye.

The incidents on both vessels underscore the brutal realities of crab fishing, where exhaustion and equipment failures can turn deadly in an instant. The Wizard, with its history of surviving 100-mph storms and mechanical breakdowns, has never lost a crew member to permanent injury, a record Colburn vowed to maintain. “Nobody’s ever lost any body parts on this boat. Lenny, you’re not going to be the first,” he told Lechenov, half-joking as he dubbed the infirmary “Lenny’s Memorial.” Steiner’s infection, meanwhile, posed a different threat, with no antibiotics on board to curb its spread. These moments, captured in visceral detail, silence critics who question Deadliest Catch’s authenticity. While producers acknowledge some narrative editing, the blood, pain, and stakes are all too real, as evidenced by recent tragedies like the death of F/V Lady Alaska crewman Jacob Veeser in Iliuliuk Harbor.

Fans on X have rallied around Lechenov and Steiner, with posts like, “Lenny’s toughness is unreal—almost losing an eye and still standing!” The accidents echo past Deadliest Catch injuries, such as Francis Katungin’s bone-shattering crab pot incident on the F/V Patricia Lee in Season 18 and the 2017 loss of the F/V Destination, which claimed six lives. The Bering Sea’s Arctic storms, blending hurricane-force winds with subzero temperatures, amplify these risks, turning decks into icy traps and docks into death zones. “One wrong step, and you’re crushed or in the water,” producer Ben Staley once told Entertainment Weekly, a sentiment that resonates with these latest near-misses.

As the Wizard and Seabrooke press on, their crews embody the resilience that defines the fishery. Colburn’s renewed crab haul and Campbell’s race against the clock highlight the economic pressures driving their relentless pace, with crab quotas still recovering from historic lows. The incidents have sparked renewed calls for better safety protocols, though larger boats and improved gear can’t eliminate the inherent dangers of 800-pound pots and 20-hour shifts. With Deadliest Catch averaging over a million viewers per episode, these stories of survival and sacrifice continue to captivate, reminding us that every crab hauled comes at a human cost. For Lechenov, Steiner, and their crews, the Bering Sea remains both a livelihood and a battleground, where luck and grit are the only shields against its wrath.