Completely agree on the "Hooper having an affair with Chief Brody’s wife" Worthless part of the book. Personally, this is a must watch every summer around the 4th of July and the reason to this day I'd don't go in the ocean. Call it stupid, but true. Living in Minnesota kinda helps solve that issue.

David, what scale are you building the Orca?

“Taxidermy man is gonna have a heart attack when he sees what I brung him!”

Well, first cut is made and we have a stern...may seem a small piece of wood but it’ll carry that name ‘Orca’ eventually.

@dirtylittlefokker - an enormous LOL to that comment!

I was 13 when I saw it in the movies. Don’t know what I’d have thought if I knew back then that I’d be watching it again in the cinema (digitally cleaned up with new 7.1 soundtrack) In 2017 wearing a suit and drinking fine wine. I guess some things in life just don’t leave you, they make a mark (positive, if you are lucky) - like model making.

Anyway, here’s a little more progress. We now have a transom AND a keel! Refreshing to work with wood, even if it is just balsa and ply.

Trivia, of a sort...
Q: Did you know the first woman seen swimming in the movie had dandruff?
A: Yep, they found her Head & Shoulders on the beach.

Groaning is optional, thank you very much. 🙂

So, I had to do this...

Hooper:
“you were on the Indianapolis?”

Brody:
“what happened?”

Quint:
“Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into her side, Chief. We was comin’ back from the island of Tinian to Leyte. We’d just delivered the bomb. The Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in 12 minutes.

Didn’t see the first shark for about a half-hour. Tiger. 13-footer. You know how you know that in the water, Chief? You can tell by lookin’ from the dorsal to the tail. What we didn’t know, was that our bomb mission was so secret, no distress signal had been sent. They didn’t even list us overdue for a week. Very first light, Chief, sharks come cruisin’ by, so we formed ourselves into tight groups. It was sorta like you see in the calendars, you know the infantry squares in the old calendars like the Battle of Waterloo and the idea was the shark come to the nearest man, that man he starts poundin’ and hollerin’ and sometimes that shark he go away… but sometimes he wouldn’t go away.

Sometimes that shark looks right at ya. Right into your eyes. And the thing about a shark is he’s got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll’s eyes. When he comes at ya, he doesn’t even seem to be livin’… ’til he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white and then… ah then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin’. The ocean turns red, and despite all your poundin’ and your hollerin’ those sharks come in and… they rip you to pieces.

You know by the end of that first dawn, lost a hundred men. I don’t know how many sharks there were, maybe a thousand. I do know how many men, they averaged six an hour. Thursday mornin’, Chief, I bumped into a friend of mine, Herbie Robinson from Cleveland. Baseball player. Boson’s mate. I thought he was asleep. I reached over to wake him up. He bobbed up, down in the water, he was like a kinda top. Upended. Well, he’d been bitten in half below the waist.

At noon on the fifth day, a Lockheed Ventura swung in low and he spotted us, a young pilot, lot younger than Mr. Hooper here, anyway he spotted us and a few hours later a big ol’ fat PBY come down and started to pick us up. You know that was the time I was most frightened. Waitin’ for my turn. I’ll never put on a lifejacket again. So, eleven hundred men went into the water. 316 men come out, the sharks took the rest, June the 29th, 1945.

Anyway, we delivered the bomb.”

Yes, there’s a couple of historical inaccuracies, but what a monologue.

Here’s just a little more progress on the Orca, with tonight’s (re) reading...

There you go, a late night thriller. Here's hoping you had to close your eyes every now and then.