I grew up on the coast on Galveston Island, and yes the Alka-Seltzer thing does work. Don't ask.
On the subject of Sea Gulls I have a story that you may like. Sea Gulls are nothing more than rats that can fly. They stink, and will swarm anyone or anything that they think may have food. Consequently they like to hang out near fishing piers and boat ramps to try and grab bait from unwary people fishing. One afternoon many years my borther and a friend of his and I were fishing from a public pier. We hadn't had much luck and were about ready to pack it in. On what was going to be the last cast of the day for my borther some stupid Sea Gull grabs the bait from the air before it even has a chance to hit the water. Funny thing about people fishing is that they tend to put hooks in the bait in hopes of catching things, fish generally. This time it wasn't a fish but a rather large, highly pi$$ed Sea Gull on the end of his line.
If you can imagine some guy reeling in a bird with a fishing pole standing in the middle of a pier with all the other people having stopped whatever they were doing to watch the comotion as the bird is flailing around and screaching and carying on. We wanted to try and get the hook out of the bird so that it might not die, but it wouldn't settle down enough for us to get closer than about 3 feet from it. We thought that it might get tired and we could get the hook out then, but every time we tried to get close to it the darn thing would freak out. After about 20 minutes the manager of the pier came out and told us that about twice a week someone hooks a bird, and the only thing that we can do is to cut the line as close to the bird (about 2 feet) as we could get. He said the bird would wind up breaking a wing or something if we tried to get too close.
After it was all over we thought that watching my brother fight with that bird was the funniest thing that we had seen, and the fact that he was covered in Sea Gull "droppings" and feathers made the situation even funnier.
Later,
Mike