Ok we have had numerous Best Maritime Movie threads but… what the best scene from a movie?
The Sand Pebbles when Jake Holman (Steve McQueen) was teaching PoHan the coolie, the steam system (live steam to sleepy steam). It was required watching for a number of cadets I had as an intro to the world of steam.
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Ha! Same film. When Richard Crenna draws his sabre and commands “Marines… Board!”
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I like the movie (Contraband maybe?) where Mark Wahlberg gets a TWIC card in about 10 seconds and then throws all the drugs or money or whatever it was over the side attached to milk cartons and goes back and find it later. Oh and the MSC container ship that magically became a MSO ship?
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And the captain in full dress blues 24/7.
Oh yea. Forgot about that part!
Also in Captain Phillips where Tom Hanks shows up to the ship with his stripes on. And then the radar beeps every time it sweeps…
Except my ABSOLUTE FAVORITE NAUTICAL SCENE of all time comes from…WHALE WARS!!
No, not the time where they launched the boat at 12 knots and didn’t keep the painter tight enough and it flipped and nearly drowned the crew. Although that’s a classic (and tragic).
On this day the seas were great, and all of a sudden the gyro shit the bed for some reason. And the weather got worse! The galley was in shambles! The galley crew tried to rescue the pots of their vegan stew they were making, but to no avail. Stew everywhere! Because the weather was bad and the gyro was dead! And then one of the geniuses fixed the gyro…and the sea was calm again. 
And the galley started to make more stew. Because THAT’s what a gyro does. Who knew? 
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From back in the day when we expected US Navy personnel to know COLREGS & the rules of the road.
In Down Periscope when Kelsey Grammer’s character puts an all around green on top of his raised periscope & orders his crew to sing “Louie, Louie” to fool the other Navy ship into believing their ancient sub is actually a fishing boat.
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It was money. They went to great lengths to over explain and give Marky Mark a loose code of ethics when it came to smuggling. No drugs, only counterfeit money. You know. Because there could be kids watching.
Contraband is laugh out loud funny. Nothing like a milk run on an 8500 teu container ship that only runs from New Orleans to Panama and then straight back. How the hell can I get that kind of run?
Sort of like the SS Cristobal back in the day (until 1981). You could occasionally get a night job when she came into New Orleans. Guys with killer cards laid for jobs on her.
PT-109; When Kennedy plows into the fuel dock.
Always kept that in mind when I was approaching the dock. . . LOL Had my fingers crossed everytime I rang up the astern bell.
Not only go from New Orleans to Panama, but also make a canal transit each way. . . . and the rather nonchalant attitude regarding the collision with the dock. . . and the SL-7 interiors for the MSC/MSO ship. . .
I watched a small (but a proper ship in fifties or sixties style) coaster in Scotland (working out of a berth in extraordinarily tight quarters, mind ye) strike a concrete seawall with its bow. Nobody seemed to take any notice, and the fellow standing next to me, when I expressed surprise, said “Ah, it was only a wee dunt”.
I should add that she was backing and filling with mere feet of clearance fore and aft, and bringing the bow within a foot of the wall each time. The wall extended about halfway up the bow. No tugs (nor any room for them), just engine and line orders. Took her twenty minutes or so to go sideways by the width of her beam.
All the small harbors I saw on the northeast coast of Scotland were artificial.
Another scene that comes to mind is from Morituri. A fight in the engine room with that huge Doxford OP running in the background. . .
Das Boot - when the boat is bombed and sinks in the dock
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Yeah but it had it’s true moments to. He had the same UHF radio I’ve had aboard every ship I’ve ever worked on. And when be goes into the crew meeting for the first time and most are ugly as sin and look like they were just released from prison I couldn’t help but smile wide and shout out: DEM’S MY BOYS! 
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And he gives them crap about taking too much time at coffee. . . .
Down Periscope, whistling whale song…
It was the first movie I got credits on. A lot different than shuffling Boxboats, tankers and the odd nuclear stuff for the Navy…
Speaking of Captain Phillips, I did like the scene when the pirates got taken down.
Just note to self, never watch that movie with my wife the night before heading to West Africa for a month.
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how about nominations for the worst nautical movie ever made?
my nomination is…
actually, if you want to laugh your ass off at the idiocy of it all you can watch the full movie here
Ending scene of “Master and Commander”.
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