Well, as a die hard Jaws fan since the age of 8, a couple friends and I went to Martha's Vineyard in early fall of 1988 to see the locations from the film. After meeting several locals who played small but important roles in the movie - including two of the shark's other victims: Craig Kingsbury and Jeff Voorhees (Ben Gardner and Alex Kintner respectively), we met up with an amazing local marine expert who had worked as the head boat ranger for the production - Lynn Murphy. Graciously, he gave the three of us a personal boat ride over to his private inlet to view up close the remains of the Orca II. (The fiberglass version of Quint's boat used for all the sinking scenes) He had purchased it and a bunch of other production materials after Universal left the island, and it had been sitting there decaying for 13 years.
Suddenly, there it was! Tangled in the weeds, rusting away. I gasped. Without thinking too carefully about it, I asked him if it would be okay if I could, try to break a piece off the buoy as a souvenir. To my utter amazement he said we could have the whole thing! It had been "cluttering up" his island, and he was happy to have folks like us come to "help him clean off my land". After a tiny bit of excited bickering, my friends relinquished the find to me, as it had been known for years that I was obsessed with that scene above all else in the film. I was deeply saddened to hear that Lynn Murphy passed away last year. He was truly a Martha's Vineyard legend. R.I.P., my friend.
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After being cleaned and sealed to prevent further rust damage, I kept the buoy as a main fixture in my various apartments, and houses over the decades. At various points it has served as a coat rack, a lamp, even a makeshift Christmas Tree one year.
In 2005, I presented it at JAWSFEST on the Vineyard among other Jaws props, where stuntwoman Susan Backlinie ("Chrissie") came for an interview for a doc I directed called "The Shark is Still Working". After the interview she also signed it for me. I recall her surprise at finding out the buoy had been a prop created by the same team that built the mechanical sharks - she had all along assumed they used a functional channel marker already at the location where her scene was filmed.
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The funny thing about this - due to my daily familiarity with this item over the decades - in a sense, it has become more of a household fixture - like a favorite piece of furniture - than a prop from a famous scene in a famous movie. Meaning that when I watch the scene in JAWS, it's kinda like seeing one's family bed or heirloom dresser appear in the middle of your favorite movie. Weird huh? But I love it!!!!! When I was around 14, I had an incredibly vivid dream once that I still remember to this day. In the dream, I swam all the way up the eastern coast to Martha's Vineyard, where I found the Jaws buoy (which for some reason was in a pond when I got there) and I drug it all the way back down to Florida in the water and put it in my swimming pool. Not saying that means anything, but I might be the only person to ever have dreamt that - and well.... there ya go.