"Just us five aboard her"

"Worth a quarter million"

..and she's got vents, hatch and porthole(s), and has a history of running through gales.

I never ever thought of the Mary Ellen as being anything other than a medium size, specifically Newfoundland trawler. But Stan didn't put a lot of detail in to spoil your own idea of what she was, did he? In fact, there's more detail about the salvage operation than about the prize. I think The MEC is very specifically a symbol, so any guesses that fall roughly within the few parameters specified are good guesses--cause that's not the point!

As for real life incidents, I think the song is fiction. But it has generated at least one real-life nautical survaval drama, as described in the video about Stan "One Warm Line". A sixtyish, hard-bitten and very salty looking Bluenoser tells how he was the engineer on an old freighter that went down in the North Atlantic somewhere between Bermuda and New York at 4 a.m. --he says he survived till he was picked up a few hours later just by singing the chorus over and over--it just came to him naturally at the time.

And that's the truth of that song--it's there to sing when you've just taken a real shitkicking!

Willie-O