The Story of Josh Harris’ Mother and Father’s Relationship Is Nuts

It’s been over 10 years since Deadliest Catch‘s Captain Phil Harris passed away, but fans of the show still remember the fisherman due to his supreme commitment and talent when it came to securing bank-account-engorging fishing hauls.

His two sons, Josh and Jake Harris are also on the popular Discovery Channel series and while viewers at home feel like they “know” the Harris family, the book penned by the late Captains’ boys, which details his relationship with their mother is full of deets.

Deets that really are bombshells once you dive right into the book that offers up a no-holds-barred, candid account of their father’s life. Fans of the show will know that Captain Phil Harris demanded cameras keep rolling, even after he was airlifted to Anchorage, Alaska when he suffered a stroke that necessitated emergency brain surgery.

The procedure did save his life, but only for eleven days more. He perished from an intracranial hemorrhage, leaving his loved ones in shock.

While remodeling Captain Phil’s room on the Cornelia Marie, Captain Josh and Casey McManus uncovered some fishing maps that belonged to his pops and they appear to be from the ’80s. It looks like Captain Phil at one point was jonesing to catch some Ahi Tuna off the Kona Coast in Hawaii and he had some intel that’ll possibly lead to Josh and Casey striking it rich in paradise.

That is if the maps were right and the fish haven’t migrated since the time of the Testarossa.

The spin-off series has rekindled an interest in Captain Phil Harris and his relationship with his family, namely Josh and Jake’s mother, Mary.

Phil first met Mary when she was an exotic dancer in an unhappy marriage. Phil and Mary had a tumultuously passionate affair and the two were married after Mary left her husband. They dated for five years before eventually tying the knot.

Phil was head over heels for the dancer and his relationship with her was characterized by periods of sobriety and fidelity. They’d go back and forth cheating on one another; attempts at spousal “one-upmanship”, until it eventually caused the two to get a divorce.

They’d been married for nine years (together for 14 years total) before they called it quits and divorced.

After Phil and Mary’s divorce, the Captain fought for sole custody of his sons and won, which was a shocking turn of events, especially when one considers Phil’s lifestyle.

Typically courts favor majority custody for the mother, especially when the father is known to have a reputation for fast and hard living like Phil does.

The Captain loved to gamble and was prone to indulge in cocaine and drinking binges.

He admitted to Josh that he’d rake in a fat $80,000 check fishing, and would blow it in about three weeks after renting out a penthouse in a fancy hotel, buy a bunch of Peruvian Marching Powder, weed, and liquor, and hire escort after escort, keeping a rotating door of partying going at his temporarily luxurious digs.

Captain Phil Harris ended up getting remarried two years after divorcing Mary to Teresa Louise, a woman that Josh and Jake affectionately referred to as “Satan.” If you couldn’t tell by the nickname the boys gave the woman, they weren’t her biggest fans, and even said that when she passed away in 2011 due to a heart attack, some eight years after she divorced Phil, Josh said that he “didn’t feel bad…[because] she was one of the meanest people I ever met.”

However, before he passed away in 2010, Phil actually asked Mary if she’d remarry him, but she declined, saying that he was better to her as a friend than a husband.

And even though their marriage had its ups and downs and things got ugly between the two of them, they were able to mend their relationship and put it in a somewhat healthy place for the sake of Josh and Jake.

You can see Josh hunt for his father’s Ahi Tuna treasure every Tuesday night at 9pm EST when new episodes of Deadliest Catch: Bloodline air on Discovery.