Colleen Laffey is a freelance videographer and a general outdoors-woman who calls Fayetteville home. She lives a stone’s throw away from The New River Gorge. But half of the year she works around the world as a videographer for major TV networks.
Her job has taken her all over the world but most recently to the far waters off Alaska’s western shores.
One of her more exciting jobs was this fall. Laffey spent a month working for the Discovery Channel on its popular reality TV series, The Deadliest Catch.
“It was kinda fun,” Laffey said. “We were fishing for king crab, which I love king crab.
“So it was kind of crazy to see what ten thousand pounds all at once looks like. I was wondering where the boat was that had the butter, and the garlic and the lemon. I was hoping that it would dock up next to ours.”
Laffey was one of a two-person crew onboard the “Trailblazer,” documenting the high-stress days of crab fishing. Laffey was onboard the ship from Oct. 16 to Nov. 17.
“Some of my job was working in the Wheel House, so I got to hang out with Wayne Baker who was the captain of the boat. He said that working on a boat was a little bit like prison with a possibility of drowning,” Laffey said.
Laffey is originally from Pittsburgh. She came to West Virginia in 1981.
She worked in the white water rafting industry for 20 years, first as a photographer, then as a video-boater.
Laffey says this unpredictable and adrenaline-packed experience helped prepare her for The Deadliest Catch.
“There’s a certain type of person that’s going to work on a fishing boat, just like there’s a certain type of person that’s going to be a river guide or a ski patroller,” Laffey said. “So, these were people I felt very comfortable with already.”
The boat launched out of Dutch Harbor on the Aleutian Islands, making its way into the Bering Sea.
“The Aleutian Chain is kind of interesting,” Laffey explained. “It looks like a sunken mountain chain.
“For the most part, all that you could see was water. Since there is so much weather, you see rainbows everyday,” said Laffey.
But it took a little while for Laffey to develop her sea legs. She was seasick for the first 30 hours of the trip.
“Whenever I had down time I would just lay in my bunk and I would eat crackers and I would drink water, and then I would puke,” Laffey said. “Then I would eat some more crackers and eat some ginger, and drink some more water and puke some more.”
Once she got over the initial seasickness, luck followed Laffey and the crew, but not everyone was so lucky.
One morning 30-foot waves crashed against the boat. Word came in that another fishing boat nearby went down.
“At the time of the phone call they had recovered three or four people and there were six people missing, and those six people did end up dying,” Laffey said.
Laffey knew going in that this was a dangerous assignment, but challenging experiences like this remind her of why she does this work.
“Part of the reason that I decided to become a photographer in the first place was to be able to go places that other people can’t go,” Laffey said. ”For me to be able to go that far out of my comfort zone, it was a challenge and it was really, kind of in a twisted way, a lot of fun.”