At 83 years old, Wareham resident Manny Silva has done a lot -- including towing a 22-foot-long mechanical shark around on the set of the movie “Jaws” over forty years ago.

The retired commercial fisherman is full of stories from his time working the South Coast-based movie, which celebrated its 40th anniversary June 1. Silva said one of the funniest days was the time he accidentally flipped the cameraman -- camera and all -- into the water.

“The cameraman kept saying, ‘I’m too high, I’m too high,’ so we lowered a little rubber raft down, and he laid in it,” Silva said. “[The crew] all started yelling, ‘Go faster, go faster!’ Pretty soon, I look, and there goes the raft, up in the air, upside-down, and there goes the camera, and everything! $35,000, that camera.”

Silva said there were also some frustrating moments, especially when he had to do one take over and over again.

“Now, you’ve got to understand, the shark is 300 feet behind me, because they don’t want my wake in the film,” Silva said. “[They said], ‘Gee, Manny, that was pretty good, but you’re a little too close.’ The next time -- ‘You’re a little bit too far.’ I said, ‘Geez, can’t you adjust the camera?’”

And there wasn’t just one shark to tow, either. There were three, including “a right-hand and a left-hand one, I called ‘em.”

“If you looked at the side of the shark, one side was all open, for [the crew] to work on,” Silva said. “The last one, that was just a balloon.”

It was this balloon that moviegoers watched explode at the end of the film, blood and guts raining down around actors Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss, as their characters paddled back to shore. Though it wasn’t real shark offal, it was several pounds worth of squid and bluefish, which had been stuffed into the balloon shark beforehand.

“We blew it to kingdom come,” Silva said. “We had one permit to blow. One permit to dynamite. So there were cameraman surrounding that thing! There was only one shot, so we had to get it right.”

Silva said he was paid $1,000 per week of work, which, he said, was very good money in 1974. He said he worked on the film for about a year.

“I didn’t get paid $25 an hour, but that’s what I should have done,” Silva said. “A lot of days we put in long days.”

Even though he worked on the set for a year to help put the movie together, Silva said the final version still gave him the willies.

“Honest to God, I worked on the movie, and it scared the [heck] out of me, when I saw it,” Silva said.