Let me try a couple...level of humor may vary and some go back a long way.
Back in the early 60's, maybe 1961, I'm working as a deck hand on a 118' yacht (Natoya) at the "Little Club" in Grosse Pte. MI. Late at night, maybe 11pm, I hear the sound of many trash cans being thrown around...what's that I thought, but it got quiet, so back to sleep I go. Next morning I observe the original Peter Stroh's (back when Stroh's Brewery was in Detroit and a major beer brand) yacht with a very long gash along the side. His yacht was a single screw (go figure) and he only had one eye (patch over one eye anyway). Anyway someone, I assume him, misjudged the fairly small entry to the Club marina and dragged the hull along the steel beams at the entrance. The rest is above.
As a note to the state of environment, I was from N. MI where the water is crystal clear. So I went diving in Lake St. Clair with fins and a mask. There was so much filth in the water, that I literally could not see my hand in front of my face. That was a 1.5min dive! People have no idea how bad the air and water used to be in the 50's and 60's!
Later that year, we took the Natoya "up north" to wait to pick up passengers in Cheboygan. Off we go out into the Straits of Mackinac and around Waugashance Pt or so, we find a 40' or so sailboat in distress which has lost rudder control somehow. We arrange to take her in tow and are backing down in 2-3' seas. Her bow is bouncing as we close in and she is about to slam down on our large steel fantail. But our other glorious deckhand comes to the rescue. He reaches out to "stop" the bow from hitting us and comes up with a forearm that looks he lost an armwrestle with Andre the Giant. Nice Z shape you might say. As luck would have it, we had a prominent DO aboard who set George's arm. Captain Mertaugh (Jim) turned the air blue at the mess table that noon about it.
Later that summer, we are headed to Lake Superior up the St. Mary's River. We heave to at Canadian Customs and get ready to tie up. I make a "perfect" throw from the bow to the guy on the dock! Then watch as the end of my line slides into the water, as I had not made it fast to the cleat! Oops. Captain shakes his head. Later at the mess, he says "Vince (never called me by my right name), that was the most F...U.. line handling I have ever seen in my life." True, itwas...
Ok, humor not rip-roaring, but you had to be there.
Later, during a college period, I sailed on a 700' ore carrier- a self unloader. We carried taconite, gravel, etc. We fitted out in Toledo, where she moored for the winter. She was owned by the Reiss Lines, now defunct. So we get underway running through ice, which bangs on the hull like crazy. I'm pulling bow watch on the Great Lakes in March...brrrr. Anyway, I keep kicking these cigar butts around up on the bow. Who smokes up here I thought. Well, later that morning, here comes the Cap...with his little dog in tow...the dog promptly creats a "cigar butt" on the deck...didn't kick any more of those around!
We had a tugboat guy come aboard from the Union (Seaman's International or SIU out of Toledo). He was really drunk one night and you had to climb up a very high ladder to get aboard from the dock. He got up ok, then proceeded to fall, once up on deck. Poor guy caught his head on one of the steel cables that tied down the self unloader to the deck. He rode that for a couple feet- not pretty cause those wire ropes had broken wires that would really cut you...bloody ouch. To make matters worse, the next day we were unloading and he pulled duty under the holds, which rise 50' above you at a 45 deg angle overhead. The gravel would get hung up on the sides and his job, with his hangover no less, was to use a sledge hammer to hammer on the steel holds to break it loose...what a headache!
Same ore carrier later in spring. We were headed into Drummond Island (a great big limestone rock really) in N. Lake Huron to pick up a load of limestone. Me and this other "deckwatch" (lowest form of deckhand) are all the way aft, near the engine room "getting the boat ready" to tie up. We had these cute steam powered deck engines for pulling wire cables for tieing up. So we are both aft, pulling lines around, warming up the engines that bled steam all the time. I feel the deck move in a strange way. Its 4am, pitch dark, little moon, and flat calm...no wind. I whispered (why whisper??), "Hey, we didn't run aground did we?" "Naw...", he says. "How could we? We're in the middle of the lake!" I was young with good legs so I hot foot it up the bow from where we were aft. I get up to the bow and all I can see in both directions is a big, rocky beach. We had run directly around right onto the beach!!! We we running light", so the bow was fairly high our out of the water and we were right up on dry land!!!
I recognize the muffled voices of the 2nd and 3rd mates screaming at each other. They were muffled, because they were all the way down in the bow below me assessing the damage where we hit. No doubt the Cap is not at all pleased with this. After about an hour, they judge that no serious harm occurred, so we pump off our ballast water and float up enough to be able to power back out into the lake. We proceeded up the beach a mile or so to the harbor and took on our load. This is pre-GPS or LORAN days, so they must have mistook a house on the beach with lights on as the harbor. Yikes!!! Otherwise, who knows?
Enuf for tonight.
