Their eight minutes of fame came and went — for this week, at least.

Tuesday night’s “Deadliest Catch,” the Discovery Channel reality-TV series featuring the dangerous life of crab fishermen in the Bering Sea, introduced the all-Kodiak crew of the F/V Incentive. All of the crew — Capt. Harry Lewis and crewmembers Larry Ryser, Doug Dawson, Jimmy Johnson, Larry Gunderson, Dominic Costello and Nuni Canete — have strong Kodiak ties, making the vessel the first 100-percent Kodiak crew yet on the series.

Ryser and Dawson were in Kodiak last night to quietly watch their big national-television premiere. There was no red carpet — just a few phone calls and text messages from family and friends excited to watch them. And lots of jokes about which footage was used and what “really happened.”

Their real party and premiere, however, was earlier in the spring when the studio invited the Incentive to Burbank, Calif., to meet the production crew. Ryser said he met some girls who served as editors of the series — girls who, though not having met him in person yet, seemingly already knew him after piecing and cutting hours of Incentive footage.

Ryser said he was pleasantly surprised by his mini-celebrity status.

“I was taken back by the attention at the party,” he said, adding that he felt like he had a small posse of groupies that night.

Ryser and his family first came to Kodiak from Cordova in 1963. Ryser comes from a fishing family: His grandfather, Edwin “Pappy” Liljegren, fished for 52 years in Prince William Sound and Kodiak. The Liljegren Passage in Prince William Sound is named after his great-grandfather, also a fisherman.

Ryser has been fishing since 1967, when his father took him out for herring. But when he reminisced about fishing in the late 1970s, Dawson chimed in that he “was in the third grade then.”

When the Incentive made its appearance on the TV the pair became excited and said they loved the initial footage of the vessel cutting through the waves of the Bering Sea.

Dawson, who has Afognak Native ancestry and was born and raised in Kodiak, said the show “doesn’t do it justice being out there and seeing it for real, those waves.”

He said, like other crewmembers have said in past interviews, the appeal of the show is less interesting for him because he does it for a living. Dawson said normally their job isn’t too interesting unless something goes wrong.

”That’s why the cameramen had to film 24/7,” Dawson said. “They could miss something if they turned their backs.”

Early on in the hour, Dawson was filmed and asked by a cameraman how he was feeling.

“There’s no sympathy in crab fishing,” he replied in an allusion to Tom Hanks’ famous “There’s no crying in baseball” line from the movie “A League of Their Own.”

Tuesday night featured injured crew from the F/V Wizard, which caused Ryser and Dawson to remember their past injuries.

For Dawson, there were plenty. In addition to numerous broken bones, he said during his first year a crab leg punctured his left eye. He was flown to Anchorage, but once recovered, immediately jumped on a boat to go out fishing again.

Ryser said he miraculously has never been badly hurt in all his years fishing.

Later, when one of the crewmembers of the F/V Cornelia Marie got stuck in a line, Ryser and Dawson said it reminded them of when Gunderson got stuck in the bight while working this season — a dramatic point they figured would be shown later as the season progresses.

Another footage highlight of the Incentive on Tuesday was when a crab pot fell downward, smashing a few crab and almost breaking the hands of the crew.

But both Ryser and Dawson figured much of their most interesting footage might not be suitable for all audiences, going above a G-rating — but they joked that if the Incentive were on Pay-Per-View, everybody “could be millionaires.”

Toward the end of the hour, a tally was shown that put the Incentive in the lead at 300,000 pounds of crab. Dawson and Ryser found their large lead from the other boats funny because they had about a nine-day head-start on the other boats.

When the credits of the hour rolled, Ryser said he had hoped to see more of his crew on the air and joked that he did get enough of the limelight.

“I didn’t get any airtime … there wasn’t enough there this time,” he said. “What I think is that they’re easing us in the next episode and it’ll be a little bit more. I wish there was only two boats, so we’d get 16 minutes instead of eight minutes.”

Dawson laughed with Ryser and said his few brief quips on the episode made him feel he “got plenty of airtime … (but) it’s nice to know they’re sticking to the serious part. I wish they could see more of how we really are, but it’s hard to do that.”

And are they tuning in next week?

Not quite.

Lyser leaves Sunday to skipper the F/V Lady Kodiak in Bristol Bay. Dawson leaves Thursday as well.

“Everybody’s fishing. This is all I’ll see. I won’t see another episode, probably.” Dawson said, adding he might only see or hear about later episodes incidentally, while in town.

Ryser laughed that he could always buy the DVD, and Dawson said he felt no need to see too much more simply because “I was there.”

Dawson concluded, “Before getting excited about anything, we’ll see how it goes, if we’re invited back on the show next year.”

Mirror writer Bradley Zint can be reached via e-mail at bzint@kodiakdailymirror.com.