Deadliest Catch season 8: what happened to Chris? Captain Keith's first response was to send him back to work
Chris Scambler joined the Wizard as a first-time greenhorn for the 2012 king crab season. Two episodes into his trouble, he was strapped to a Coast Guard basket and lifted off the deck.
The part people remember is what Keith Colburn said before that.
The episode where he asked to stop
In episode 5, "Alien Abduction," Scambler starts openly questioning whether he should have taken the job. He's in pain and says so. Colburn's answer was to put him back on deck — a call that reads badly in isolation and reads differently once you know that greenhorns complain constantly and captains have quota to fill.
Then the symptoms stopped resembling complaint.
How fast it escalated
- Neck pain and numbness — the first signs, dismissed as the standard greenhorn beating.
- Gatorade — the crew assumed dehydration and tried to rehydrate him on the spot.
- Double vision — the point at which Colburn concluded this was something else entirely.
- Convulsions in the gear room — Scambler loses motor control on the floor.
- The medevac call — Colburn radios the Coast Guard.
The rescue plays out in episode 7, "Vital Signs." A USCG helicopter lifts him off the Wizard and flies him to Anchorage. Colburn, who drills his crew constantly for man-overboard, fire, and abandon-ship scenarios, told Entertainment Weekly the obvious problem:
"We don't have a drill for evacuating a guy off the boat."
What was actually wrong
Dehydration and shock — severe enough that his heart rate spiked while his blood pressure dropped. He survived, which was confirmed on After the Catch. It's one of the rare Deadliest Catch emergencies that came from inside the body rather than from a wave, a crane, or a hydraulic table.
As he was being prepped for the lift, Scambler apologized to Colburn for the inconvenience.
"Don't be sorry, man, you did a great job for me," Colburn told him.
Did he ever come back?
No. Scambler never returned to the Wizard or the series. He turned up briefly in the 2018 special Deadliest Catch: Coast Guard Heroes and has otherwise stayed entirely out of public view — no social media presence, no interviews. Other greenhorns who left injured came back, Jake Anderson and Freddy Maugatai among them. Scambler didn't.
One season, seven episodes, one helicopter. That's the whole résumé.