business
Who Owns the Cornelia Marie? The Registry Says a Company, and the Company Changed Hands in 2024
In brief
Who owns the Cornelia Marie?
The vessel's owner of record has not changed in years: the Cornelia Marie is documented with the US Coast Guard to a Seattle limited liability company, F/V Cornelia Marie LLC. What changed is who owns that company. In June 2024 a new group took over - reported as former deckhand Taylor Jensen alongside long-time partners Roger Thomas and Kari Toivola, with Jake Albinio running the boat. Josh Harris and Casey McManus, the owners most viewers know, are out.
And owning the boat is only one of four separate things you can own here. The steel, the federal right to catch crab with it, the name, and the television footage are four distinct assets held by four different parties. The most valuable of them is probably not the boat.
Why this question is genuinely hard
Almost every page answering this question names an individual and stops. That is why they keep going out of date, and why they contradict each other. A commercial fishing vessel in the Bering Sea sits at the intersection of four ownership regimes that operate independently, and a change in one of them does not show up in the others.
Figure
Four assets, four owners, one boat
1 · The hull
The documented vessel
Owned by F/V Cornelia Marie LLC and recorded with the US Coast Guard National Vessel Documentation Center under official number 957458. The registry names the company, never the people behind it.
2 · The company
Membership of the LLC
Where the real ownership change happens. Members can be bought out and replaced without the vessel record altering by a single character - which is exactly what happened in June 2024.
3 · The quota
The right to catch crab
A separate federal privilege. Since 2005, crab quota share is held by people and companies, not by boats, and it is transferable independently of any hull.
4 · The fame
Name and footage
The television footage belongs to the production company and network, not to the vessel's owners. The commercial value of the name is a third thing again, licensed rather than sold.
A person can own any one of these without the others. Most confusion about the Cornelia Marie comes from assuming they move together.
The vessel record
US commercial fishing vessels above five net tons are documented federally rather than registered by a state, and the record is a matter of public administration. For the Cornelia Marie the identifying data is stable and checkable.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Owner of record | F/V Cornelia Marie LLC, Seattle, Washington |
| USCG official number | 957458 |
| Call sign | WCW4672 |
| IMO number | 8852538 |
| Flag and hailing port | United States; Kodiak, Alaska |
| Built | 1989, steel hull, Bayou La Batre, Alabama |
| Length and beam | Approximately 115 ft (35 m) by 30 ft (9 m) |
| Alaska ADF&G number | 59109 |
Identifiers as carried in public vessel registries. The authoritative source is the US Coast Guard National Vessel Documentation Center, which publishes the documented owner by official number. vesselfinder.com
Note what that first row does and does not tell you. It names a company. Limited liability companies are the standard holding structure for commercial fishing vessels, for the obvious reason - a boat that can sink, foul gear or injure a crewman is a liability best kept inside a separate entity. The consequence for anyone researching ownership is that the public record is permanently one layer short of the answer.
The registry has named the same owner for years. The people behind that name have changed twice.
Who has actually controlled the boat
Reading through the human layer rather than the registry layer, the sequence runs like this.
| Period | Who held it | What changed |
|---|---|---|
| 1980s-2010 | Phil Harris and partners | Harris skippered the vessel for more than twenty years as captain and part owner. He died on 9 February 2010. |
| 2010s-2024 | Josh Harris and Casey McManus | Phil Harris's son and a fellow captain bought in and became the public faces of the vessel's ownership. |
| 2022 | - | Discovery ended the vessel's involvement in the series following reporting on Josh Harris's criminal record from 1998. |
| June 2024 onward | Taylor Jensen, Roger Thomas, Kari Toivola and Jake Albinio | A new partnership took over, reported when Jensen announced his co-ownership publicly on 17 June 2024. Albinio has been running the boat. |
The 2024 group is established through contemporaneous reporting and the owners' own public statements rather than through a filing. Private LLC membership is not published, so percentage splits between the four are not in the public record and should not be assumed to be equal. tvinsider.com
The asset that matters more than the boat
Here is the part almost nobody covering this vessel explains, and it is the reason a crab boat's ownership question cannot be answered by naming a hull owner.
Since 2005, the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands crab fisheries have run under the Crab Rationalization Program, administered by NOAA Fisheries. Before it, boats raced each other for a share of a common total catch. After it, the catch was privatised into transferable shares. fisheries.noaa.gov
Quota share (QS)
A long-term privilege issued to qualifying harvesters based on their catch history. It is held by a person or company, is transferable, and is subject to holding caps. It is not attached to a vessel.
Individual fishing quota (IFQ)
The annual pounds a quota-share holder may catch, calculated each year from their QS against the season's total allowable catch. Ninety per cent of catcher-vessel owner shares are issued as Class A.
Processor quota (IPQ)
A matching privilege held by processors. Class A crab may only be delivered to a processor holding unused IPQ, which is why the shore plants hold structural power over the fleet.
The practical effect is that the Cornelia Marie's steel is a tool, and the quota is the business. A boat with no quota can only work by leasing someone else's, or by tendering and other non-quota work. A quota holder with no boat can lease the fishing out and never leave shore. When a crab vessel changes hands, the question that determines the value of the deal is whether the quota went with it - and that is a private commercial term that is never announced.
It also explains the vessel's recent working pattern. Bering Sea crab has been through a brutal decade: the snow crab fishery was closed outright for the 2022-23 season and Bristol Bay red king crab was closed for consecutive seasons, wiping out quota value across the fleet. Boats that survived diversified into tendering - carrying other vessels' catch to processors - which requires no quota at all.
The hull is a tool. The quota is the business. They are bought and sold separately.
The name, and the footage
A third and fourth asset sit on top. Deadliest Catch is produced by Original Productions for Discovery. The footage shot aboard any participating vessel is the production's property under the release agreements that let cameras aboard in the first place - which is why a boat leaving the show does not take its past episodes with it, and why the vessel's owners cannot licence that footage themselves. originalproductions.com
The name is separate again. A vessel name is not automatically a trademark; commercial rights in "Cornelia Marie" as a brand - merchandise, coffee, apparel, appearances - depend on registrations and licences held by whoever pursued them, and those can and do stay with a previous owner after a hull is sold. Buying a boat does not buy its merchandising line, and there is no public reason to assume the 2024 transaction included it.
Is the Cornelia Marie still fishing?
Yes. As of 2026 the vessel remains an active, US-documented commercial fishing boat working Alaskan seasons and tendering work. What ended in 2022 was its television career, not its working life. That distinction is the source of most of the "what happened to the Cornelia Marie" traffic: viewers experienced a boat disappearing, when what actually happened was a broadcaster ending a relationship with one person aboard it.
Frequently asked questions
Does Josh Harris still own the Cornelia Marie?
No. Josh Harris and Casey McManus were bought out; a new partnership took over in June 2024. Harris had already ceased to appear on the series in 2022.
Who owns the Cornelia Marie now?
The documented owner is F/V Cornelia Marie LLC of Seattle. Behind that company, reporting and the owners' own statements identify Taylor Jensen, Roger Thomas, Kari Toivola and Jake Albinio. The split between them is not public.
Why did the Cornelia Marie leave Deadliest Catch?
Discovery ended the vessel's participation in 2022 after reporting surfaced a 1998 criminal record against its then-captain and co-owner. The decision concerned an individual; the boat went with him because he was part of the ownership.
How much is the Cornelia Marie worth?
No sale price has been published, and any single figure would be misleading. The hull, the crab quota and any brand rights are separate assets that may or may not have moved together, and quota values have swung violently with the Bering Sea closures.
Can I look up who owns a fishing boat myself?
Yes. The US Coast Guard's National Vessel Documentation Center lets you search documented vessels by name or official number and returns the owner of record. Expect a company name rather than a person - documented vessels are almost always held in an entity.
Is the Cornelia Marie still fishing in 2026?
Yes. It remains an active US-flagged commercial vessel working Alaskan seasons and tendering, hailing port Kodiak.
Key takeaways
The bottom line
- The documented owner is a company - F/V Cornelia Marie LLC of Seattle, USCG official number 957458 - and that has not changed through two changes of control.
- Josh Harris and Casey McManus were bought out in June 2024 by a group reported as Taylor Jensen, Roger Thomas, Kari Toivola and Jake Albinio.
- Crab quota is owned separately from the boat under NOAA's 2005 Crab Rationalization Program and is the more valuable asset in most transactions.
- The show's footage belongs to Original Productions and Discovery, not to the vessel's owners, which is why leaving the series takes nothing with it.
- The vessel left television in 2022 for reasons concerning a person, not the boat. It is still working.
Final word
Ask who owns a famous boat and you get a name. Ask what that name owns and the answer splinters into a hull, a federal harvest privilege, a trademark and an archive of television footage - held, in this case, by four different parties, only one of which is listed anywhere public.