‘Deadliest Catch’: Why Did Jake Anderson Lose The Saga? His Boat Drama Explained

Season 21 of Deadliest Catch features Jake Anderson aboard the F/V Titan Explorer, but this is not the ship he was best known to captain throughout the majority of the series.

When he first joined the show in 2007, he was working on the F/V Northwestern, and then eventually took over as captain of the F/V Saga from Seasons 11 to 19 of the crab fishing show. However, when Deadliest Catch returned for Season 20 in 2024, Anderson revealed that he had lost the Saga, which completely turned things upside down for him.

Scroll down for everything we know about what happened to the Saga and the aftermath of the drama.

What happened with the F/V Saga?

Before Anderson began filming Season 20 of Deadliest Catch, he found a lock and repossession note on the F/V Saga, which he was the captain and part owner of.

“I found out on a Friday in August,” Anderson told TV Insider. “Everything was situated to go red crab fishing. Then September 1, things started to look dark.” He also added, “I went from having the most King Crab to catch and having a nice platform I built with my own two hands, to losing it all over a weekend.”

He further explained the situation on a 2024 episode of Deadliest Catch. “A couple weeks ago, I got a call from my partner saying that the Saga is possibly running out of money,” Anderson shared. “King Crab’s open, and that was going to get us out of the hole, easily. But I had no idea that things were this bad.”

Why did Jake Anderson lose The F/V Saga?

The issues with the saga had to do with the boat’s co-owner, Lenny Herzog, according to Anderson.

“I found out my partner, with all due respect with the legal things going on, we don’t know what he did. I lost my boat,” Anderson shared in our interview.

Since Anderson mostly dealt with the operations on the boat, while Herzog handled the financials, he reportedly wasn’t exactly privy to what was going on.

What is Jake Anderson doing now?

After the issues with The F/V Saga, Anderson received help from his former mentor Sig Hansen, who invited him back on The F/V Northwestern to work for the King Crab season.

“For Sig specifically, not that I expected him to take me in, but we both knew we’d had a tumultuous relationship,” Anderson told us. “Without my boat, I’m not a threat to him anymore. I can only be an asset. Honestly, if you asked him, I think he was, in a very small way, happy to have some of his team back again.”

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It wasn’t easy for Anderson to not be the leader anymore, though. “I really had to step down, and that was really hard for me,” he admitted. “It really settled in where I was and where I was in reality, in that I didn’t think I was going to end up sitting on the port side of the old boat I used to work on. Yet, there I was.”

By the end of Season 20, Anderson became captain of the F/V Titan Explorer, which is the boat he helms now.

Deadliest Catch, Season 21, Fridays, 8/7c, Discovery Channel