We were in Subic - in the summer no less. 110 in the shade. 110 at midnight. Now I'm not big on heat and I was getting a little sick of the "shows," so I went back to the boat found an empty rack in a cool place in the forward room and crashed. I woke up at 2200 hours feeling very strange. Next to my rack was a box of mangos that someone had dragged down the forward hatch. Something very unfriendly also came aboard and decided to take a bite out of me. In short, I felt like hell and had, literally, blown up to twice my size. I looked like the Michellin Man.

I could barely move and I could barely make it through the hatches to control. Almost everyone was on the beach, so I just sat there, blowing up like the Macy's float, praying the Doc would get back.

Sure enough, around midnight, he comes stumbling down the after battery hatch so drunk he could barely stand. I mean gone. Out. Finito. I turn him around and he takes one look at me and says very calmly: "Shit. Follow me." We stumble back into Hogan's Alley. It's pitch dark.

He starts rumbling through a huge case of pills. I can hear the plastic bottles being shuffled around. He's swaying and can barely stand. I say to myself: "He's going to kill me. He's going to give me the wrong stuff and I'm going to die here in Subic the size of the Hindenberg.

Finally, after a very long five minutes, he pulls out one pill. Not a bottle, just one pill. "Take this," he says, and folds himself like a collapsing tent into his rack and he's out. I look at the pill, look at the guys who are looking at me like I'm from Mars and decide: "What the hell." I take the pill, crawl into my rack and wake up 24 hours later my normal size. No one woke me or bothered me. I couldn't believe it.

I went looking for the Doc to thank him, but he was out drinking. Loved that guy.

Don't know if this qualifies as a prank or just malicious mischief. Seems there was a real "sundowner" of a skipper who was roundly hated and feared by the whole crew.  Also seems as if he had a constant case of the crabs.  Whatever curative measures he took the little critters always seemed to reappear after awhile.

One day the XO was sitting in the 3-man stateroom doing paperwork when he heard the steward mumbling to himself while making up the skippers bunk. Curious, the XO quietly stepped across the passageway and pulled back the CO's curtain.  What he saw was the steward's pants at half mast, the steward divesting himself of critters onto the CO's sheets, mumbling "take that you rotten @#$#@#".

The XO quietly closed the curtain without saying a word to anyone, till years later.  The mystery of the Captain's crabs were never officially solved.