porcupinewebb

Well just how much can I say without the risk of giving anything away? This was just the most unexpected ending done so remarkably well but at the same time it was totally understandable that it deserves an award of some kind both for the acting and writing.

I have no idea how they can, but am sure there will be a sixth series by the end of the year. Without giving too much away I hope they do not take a 'Dallas' way out of a problem that now exists. The silly thing is though that they have almost used this theme exactly the same way before!

Enough said except to say that the whole House M.D thing is just too good to be just an American TV series!

One of the only films to leave me crying, not for the great acting, the shooting or anything else but just the story and how it relates to my past life. Not long after leaving school I went to work on a long line boat catching cod. A few weeks after starting went out with a young skipper and we got caught in some awful weather that resulted in the loss of the boat, it was breaking up on the shingle. Whilst we were pretty sure of our position in general we were not sure if we were breaking up on the beach or the sand bar a few hundred metres off-shore. We had no choice, the boat was disintegrating around us, we had to leave the boat. Visibility was less than twenty metres. Taking that step out of the boat, knowing that if this was the sand bar and not the beach we would be dead in minutes, well you just can not explain what it feels like. Seeing this film brought back such memories as I have tried to forget and is the reason I have only seen this film the once although I do have a still shrink-wrapped copy on DVD and hope to watch it again one day.

The line, "this is going to be hard on my little boy" as one of the crew accepts his fate is just so , how it was. No panic, no hysterics, just resignation after working to try and make things come to together. That is just how I felt when I stepped of the wreck boat and in the direction the waves were breaking. After a few metres we knew we were on the beach.

Wolfgang Petterson does a great job of capturing everything that the life of a long-line fisherman is about. I can not comment on how factually accurate the story is to the real events of the real Andrea Gail but I will personally vouch for the feelings and emotions this film conveys.

As for me, I was rescued form the beach along with my skipper by the coastguard and after a night in hospital being treated for exposure was back working on a different boat in less than a week.