Thank you, @asekular - there’s a movie, ‘What happened to Monday.’ Set in a dystopian future where you are allowed one child. One couple have identical sextuplets and name them after days of the week and only allow them out one at a time to avoid capture. One little girl has an accident and loses her pinkie finger - we’ll, out came the hatchet for the others...

There was also a Stephen king movie about stopping smoking and a cast iron way of quitting - involved the loss of a finger for every smoke. People learn quickly like that...

Finger loss in movies...discuss...

Anyway, appreciate your input, Aleksander. Always.

Well noted and a great bridge back into the movie, Tom. I know there are one or two inaccuracies about the Indianapolis monologue, but as Shaw was by all accounts a little under the influence of Scotland’s finest export, I’ll forgive him.

There’s a lot of mythology about the speech, so here’s Spielberg’s personal recollection;

Steven Spielberg: “I owe three people a lot for this speech. You’ve heard all this, but you’ve probably never heard it from me. There’s a lot of apocryphal reporting about who did what on Jaws and I’ve heard it for the last three decades, but the fact is the speech was conceived by Howard Sackler, who was an uncredited writer, didn’t want a credit and didn’t arbitrate for one, but he’s the guy that broke the back of the script before we ever got to Martha’s Vineyard to shoot the movie.”

“I hired later Carl Gottlieb to come onto the island, who was a friend of mine, to punch up the script, but Howard conceived of the Indianapolis speech. I had never heard of the Indianapolis before Howard, who wrote the script at the Bel Air Hotel and I was with him a couple times a week reading pages and discussing them.”

“Howard one day said, “Quint needs some motivation to show all of us what made him the way he is and I think it’s this Indianapolis incident.” I said, “Howard, what’s that?” And he explained the whole incident of the Indianapolis and the Atomic Bomb being delivered and on its way back it was sunk by a submarine and sharks surrounded the helpless sailors who had been cast adrift and it was just a horrendous piece of World War II history. Howard didn’t write a long speech, he probably wrote about three-quarters of a page.”

“But then, when I showed the script to my friend John Milius, John said “Can I take a crack at this speech?” and John wrote a 10 page monologue, that was absolutely brilliant, but out-sized for the Jaws I was making! (laughs) But it was brilliant and then Robert Shaw took the speech and Robert did the cut down. Robert himself was a fine writer, who had written the play The Man in the Glass Booth. Robert took a crack at the speech and he brought it down to five pages. So, that was sort of the evolution just of that speech.”

The latest USS Indianapolis was launched last April.

Captain’s log, stardate 2489...oops, wrong WiP.

Began work on the pulpit today. This is a tricky build, mainly as there’s some lightening/drainage holes that are difficult to replicate.

So, I played with laminating very finely sliced balsa strips...

And biding them together, with alternate long and short strips, to reproduce the original look.

Hoping that this will capture the look I want, so far so...ok.

Thanks, Greg. Here’s the initial dry fit of the pulpit.

And here’s a Friday night photo hard to beat...

I'll never forget the first time I saw this movie in the theater, way back in 1975. Went with my then-wife and her little brother (14 at the time). At the end of the movie, he and I are getting up to leave, and she tells us, "I can't get up!" Her arms and hands were numb from the elbow down - we had sat to either side of her, and had rach grabbed her arms so tightly we cut off circulation! Needless to say, we were the last out of the theater.

If you want to see where everything Spielberg has done in his movies came from (he had it all, from the very beginning), go to Netflix and download "Duel." A TV movie he did in 1973, the first "feature" he ever did. Dennis Weaver versus a killer 18-wheeler. When my wife and I saw it, there were no DVRs or any other recorders, you watched it with commercials and that was the way it was - by the second set of commercials, we were jumping up and down, "Hurry! Hurry!" Now you can see it sans commercials. Every little tweak he does to you, on display from the beginning. "Duel" was what got him hired to do "Jaws".

🙂 Pretty close... almost word for word... 🙂

Nice progress David ! It's looking good from here.

By chance are you going to be motorizing this one or adding some miniature RC electronics ?

Now that would step it up a notch and allow you to play with it in the park !

Curious minds want to know ... :). It would definitely draw some attention if you did.

That last picture you posted looks like it has been beached if you add some imagination. I remember many years ago my Dad would beach his 35 foot fishing boat at high tide in the harbor and then work on the bottom as the tide went out. He had to hurry with the scraping of barnacles and painting before the tide came back in.

Hobgoblin huh ? Looks good but it's been many years since I had one. I don't really miss it though.

More of an ice tea person now.

118 posts and counting ! Yep. We are in for a long trip here boys !

The details you have added to the cabin and the fore deck look great !