The Secrets of Salt Success Ten strategies, perhaps better left unlearned by Larry Bozka Saltwater fishing is a secretive business. Should you doubt this, try finding hot new GPS coordinates in your local newspaper's outdoor page. Sure, every once in a while some condescending outdoor writer will run a story called "Secrets of the Pros" or "Time-Proven Techniques Revealed." Sorry, but despite the cryptic titles and clandestine implications, it's nothing but a bunch of overblown hype. If all that stuff was really secret they wouldn't be telling everyone in Creation. So what's the difference this time? When it comes to the following, you can tell anybody you want to. No one's going to believe you, anyway. 1) THE SECRET TO DETERMINING AND REMEMBERING THE PROPER LURE RETRIEVE LIES IN TV THEME SONGS.   Establishing a pattern" is essential to successful lure fishing. If a given retrieve works once, it'll work again, provided we remember exactly what we were doing to the lure. Unfortunately, sudden strikes usually result in complete memory loss. So, the trick is to use music to establish and recall the most effective tempo. For reasons unknown to mortal anglers, television theme songs work best. The toe-tapping rhythm of the "Leave it to Beaver" theme is great for working topwaters in the late-spring and early-summer, when trout and redfish are active and aggressive. Conversely, the much slower beat of "Alfred Hitchcock" is deadly in winter, when the fish are lethargic. When skipping a spoon on the surface, stick with "The Beverly Hillbillies" and "Hawaii Five-O." Shrimp tails should be bumped on the bottom to the beat of either "Flipper" or "The Addams Family." For more possibilities, consult your local listings. 2) URINATING ON A PORTUGUESE MAN O' WAR WOUND DOES ABSOLUTELY NO GOOD.   There's a time-honored belief that promptly urinating on a man o' war wound is an effective means of alleviating the intense pain which immediately follows an encounter with the dreaded purple bubble. This is pure baloney. Not only is it ineffective; it's also quite humiliating when your allegedly well-intentioned companions gather to relieve themselves on your leg. Instead, it's much better to urinate on the man o' war. It doesn't do anything to ease the physical pain, but it sure makes you feel a lot better about the situation in general. 3) SEASICKNESS IS ACTUALLY A TEMPORARY FORM OF DEMONIC POSSESSION.   It's important to remember here that people who go on offshore trips knowing fully well that they're more than likely going to end up violently ill are insane to begin with. I myself have thrown up everything I've eaten since kindergarten, and can only surmise that the devil made me do it. Rail-huggers produce sounds, substances and obscenities that could only be conceived by Satan himself. Furthermore, it's a frightening fact that prolonged efforts to keep the eyes fixed on the horizon invariably result in 360-degree head rotation. Though I'd much rather not, I can vividly remember several white-knuckle offshore outings upon which it would have been necessary to get considerably better before being able to die. No wonder, then, that we've become so comfortable with expressions like "devilish seas," "sicker than the devil" and "rough as hell." 4) THE MANNER IN WHICH A PERSON DEALS WITH A BACKLASH REVEALS MUCH ABOUT HIS OR HER CHARACTER.   A psychiatrist can spend all day studying ink spot interpretations and not discover half as much about a person's temperament as he can from watching said person untangle a monster backlash. Watch closely the next time your fishing partner makes a 100-yard cast that lands 10 feet from the boat. Granted, it's not a pretty sight, but you'll learn something you may otherwise not discover until it's too late. Well-adjusted people will spend the better part of an hour picking away at even the most hopelessly tangled bird's nest and never utter a word of complaint. On the other hand, those with dangerous psychological tendencies go straight for the fillet knife, all the while cursing profusely and blaming the incident on either their fishing partner, inferior centrifugal brake systems or errant breezes. If, as a test, criminal psychologists would hand suspected serial killers and mass murderers a bait-casting outfit rigged with a featherweight balsa wood plug and instruct them to cast directly into a strong oncoming wind, we could save a lot of taxpayers' money Just a thought. 5) THE 'MYSTERY' OF WHY MULLET JUMP IS ACTUALLY NO MYSTERY AT ALL.   Some say it's to knock parasites free. Others claim that it's to get extra oxygen. In actuality, up until now, no one has revealed the real reason why mullet jump so much. In the interest of science, at long last, here it is. They're scared to death. We've all heard of "nervous water." Considering that even the water is nervous, you can imagine how a mullet must feel. If being eaten alive was on your mind 24 hours a day, you'd be jumpy, too. It took many, many years to figure this one out. Thanks to a less-than-complimentary coach, I grew up thinking "mullet" were actually junior high school football players. Considering the way our team was regularly slaughtered, it wasn't a difficult theory to accept. 6) MANY POPULAR SPECIES OF SALTWATER FISH WERE ACTUALLY NAMED AFTER CARS AND BOATS.   Though truly an unknown fact, this one doesn't always make sense. No doubt about it; in its day, the Plymouth Barracuda was one fast set of wheels, and the fish does its namesake justice. A stingray, on the other hand, doesn't exactly evoke images of lightning quickness. . .unless, of course, you're referring to someone who has just stepped on one. No wonder, then, that the car is commonly referred to by its family name, "Corvette," while the creature is known by the genus name "stingray." The biologist who named the cobia, wahoo, robalo and mako obviously had fine taste in watercraft. Who, after all, would want to spend hard-earned cash to run offshore in a 25-foot "Black Drum"?   7) DESPITE WHAT YOU HEAR ON TV FISHING SHOWS, THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS A 'NICE FISH.'   There's a good reason why freshly-decked offshore fish like cobia and king mackerel want to break your legs. Drive a barb into any marine creature's mouth, drag it through the water at 15 miles an hour and whack it between the eyes with a billy club, and then tell me it's going to be "nice." Give me a break. If I hear one more fishing show host say, "Nice fish!" I'm going to hire one of those aforementioned serial killers. Or, better yet, give the billy club to the fish. 8) MOST PEOPLE WHO ARE KILLED BY LIGHTNING ON THE WATER DIE WHILE FIGHTING A FISH.   A fisherman's IQ drops by no less than 50 percent when he's fighting a fish. This explains, for one thing, why the big ones get away more often than not. It also explains why violent thunderstorms are so often ignored by anglers until it is too late. The moral here? Don't continue to fish while an electrical storm is approaching, even if the fish are biting like drug-crazed piranhas. Do something safer, like playing chicken with a supertanker, or maybe going for a morning swim in your chum line. 9) RULERS AND SCALES DO NOT ACCURATELY REPRESENT THE LENGTH AND WEIGHT OF TROPHY-CLASS FISH.   This has nothing whatsoever to do with the quality of the rulers and scales on today's market. Rather, it has to do with the person to whom you reveal the aforementioned dimensions. Fishermen have a regrettable reputation as stretchers of both the truth and the size of conquered fish. (Thus, the term "fish story.") As a result, when a victorious angler tells his tale, the listener automatically deducts a minimum of 25 percent from the reported weight of the fish and 10 percent from its length and girth. Therefore, a bona fide 10-pound, 32-inch speckled trout is immediately reduced to a 7-1/2-pound, 27.2-incher. Adding inches to the ruler and poundage to the scale is not the answer. Doing so will only be used against you as "proof" of your lack of integrity. Sooner or later, it will also get you arrested, because you'll forget about it. The game warden, unfortunately, will not. So, left with no socially acceptable option, the only alternative is to "verbally compensate" (not to be confused with lying). 10) LURE PRESENTATION IS NOT THE ALL-IMPORTANT ASPECT OF SPORT FISHING THAT IT'S CRACKED UP TO BE.   In continuing efforts to further confuse the angling public, outdoor writers frequently make it a point to stress the importance of "lure presentation." As the term implies, this is simply the manner in which an artificial bait is presented to a fish. The only way to determine the impact of this or any other supposedly effective fishing practice is to give it an objective test in an actual field situation. In that spirit, a close companion and I recently experimented with different presentations of identical topwater plugs. Before making a cast, he would say, "Now, for your qualified perusal, I respectfully submit to you this 5/8-ounce blue-and-silver broken-back floater/diver." I, on the other hand, would holler, "Here it comes, you no-good, mud-rustling, spot-tailed shrimp-suckers!" Regardless of presentation, we experienced the same results. Neither one of us got a strike all day. Illustrations by Mark Mantell   ⌐ Texas Fish & Game Publishing Co., L.L.C. All rights reserved.