NEW YORK -- As wheel house two-way radios crackled with news of trouble on the fishing vessel Katmai last fall, captains didn't share the information with their crews, Sig Hansen acknowledged in an interview on the CBS "Early Show" Tuesday morning.

Hansen, appearing with Captain Keith Colburn to promote the new season of "The Deadliest Catch," said he would "absolutely not" tell his crew about what happened with the Katmai, which sank while film crews were shooting aboard his boat, the Northwestern.

In response to a question from the "Early Show's" Harry Smith about whether a captain should talk about trouble on another boat in the fleet, Hansen said, "No way. You got to keep the morale up, so you don't want to bring them down."

"You gotta pick your time (to tell the crew about it)," he added.

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Colburn agreed, saying there are usually few facts immediately at hand.

"You don't know. All you're hearing is the mayday. You don't know what's happening. You're detached from it, so you can't tell someone this happened until you know, until you have some more facts," Colburn said. Colburn said the Katmai was in waters well west of where his boat, The Wizard, was fishing.

The Katmai went down in a storm off Alaska's Aleutian Islands with the loss of seven of its 11 crewmen Oct. 22.