Pennant-bedecked and fresh paint, the Steamship Authority’s newest ($3.8 million) and biggest ferryboat (230 feet, 1,000 passengers, 494 net tons of freight), the motor vessel Nantucket, docked Wednesday at the Oak Bluffs wharf for public inspection. The Regional High School band and hundreds of cheering spectators had welcomed her to Woods Hole at the end of her 871-mile voyage from her Jacksonville, Fla., shipyard birthplace. She goes into service from the mainland to Oak Bluffs and Nantucket today.

The filming of the movie Jaws began that morning on South Beach, and suddenly the parking lot at the end of Katama Road looked like lower Fifth avenue — trucks galore, even a bus. Some had been rented, but others belonging to Universal Studios had traveled the 3,000 miles from Pacific to Atlantic.

At Katama, shooting started yesterday on Jaws. Around the Universal Studios offices the day before, one wouldn’t have believed it was going to happen.

For a nerve-tattering 24 hours this week, Universal Studios’ production on Martha’s Vineyard of the smash-to-be film Jaws was a suspense story that no audience will ever see.

The $3 1/2-million project had run afoul of the law — the production crew had not gotten permission to do a batch of things it was doing.

And permission-getting, which involves formal public notice (see legal advertisements, Page Two), hearings, and mature deliberation, can be agonizingly long. Production costs are budgeted at $30,000 a day.

The firm, flat fields of Katama, the so-called Great Plain - what use could the energetic men of the 1920’s make of the stretching monotony to fully exploit its, well, its...evenness? The twenties were roaring, but on the Great Plains one could barely work up a sigh; the wind from the sea must be bored itself by the time it had blown over the fields and reached Edgartown.