The fruits of his labor: a big bull dolphin for Capt. Eric Hamilton. Above right, Willie Allen plays a schoolie. Opposite is a closeup look at the quarry.

Word around town was slow dolphin fishing. As I watched a four-pound schoolie arc through the air and land with a thud in the bow of our boat, I had to laugh.

The fish passed neatly as a soccer ball through the legs of Capt. Eric Hamilton, who turned and gave me a perplexed look.

“I’ve never seen that happen before,” he said, a white jig dangling from the tip of his rod.

The fish now flopping around on deck had been one of a pack racing for Hamilton’s bucktail. The skipper cranked the spinning reel as fast as he could, and evidently, as happens with dolphin sometimes, the lead fish overshot its target.

Now the Provider in his infinite wisdom may have forgotten to equip these speedsters with brakes, but he did give them split-second reaction time, as well as decision-making ability ranking slightly above that of your average housefly.

Rather than head-butt a fiberglass wall, the fish simply tilted its pectoral fins and took off like a jet.

Willie Allen and I cheered when we saw the fish come aboard, but Hamilton remained sort of stunned. I think it dawned on him that had the trajectory been a few degrees higher he likely would have suffered an embarassing and potentially injurious below-the-belt collision with a fish.

Anyway, I tell this story to prove I wasn’t exaggerating when I later told a friend that, reports to the contrary, fish were jumping in the boat.

It was September, typically a slow month on the blue water off South Florida. Sargassum weedlines, which anglers often associate with dolphin fishing, had been scarce for weeks. The good runs of early summer fish were a distant memory; at the same time, the fall kingfish and sailfish runs were a few months off yet.

But we weren’t complaining. Hamilton, a dolphin specialist, knew there was more out there than just hordes of bonito. We just had to do some looking.

Before sunrise, we left Crandon Park on Key Biscayne on the optimistic side of the old glass-half-full-or-half-empty debate. We weren’t going to bemoan the absence of miles-long weedlines; instead, we would focus on locating the omnipresent debris adrift on the Gulf Stream—the little stuff that inattentive fishermen sometimes miss. We would also keep our eyes peeled for sea birds, which often accompany the schools of dolphin that traditionally begin moving south sometime in early fall.

The kind of debris the dolphin fisherman looks for is basically the detritus of coastal civilization, washed into the sea and pulled along by the northbound current. Lots of it is marine in origin, such as wooden shipping pallets, sections of rope, migrant coconuts. Some of it defies easy explanation, like the red fireman’s hat we found 20 miles off Fowey Light. This discovery was even more unusual in that Hamilton and Willie are both employed by the City of Miami Fire Department. They assured me that the barnacle-encrusted hat belonged to no one they knew.

Hat, plywood, cooler lid—basically, anything that casts a shadow in the water column eventually attracts some form of marine life. Triggerfish, flyingfish and small jacks seek refuge in the shadow, and feast on even smaller critters you and I don’t see.

But not all debris is the same. Clean, fresh debris may not have had time to gather a following. It’s the gnarly stuff you’re looking for, like pieces of wood that seem to have started growing again, or items surrounded by bits of sargassum, perhaps indicating a nutrient-rich edge of changing currents and/or water temperatures.

I took note of how Hamilton evaluated each piece of flotsam he spotted from his console tower. The skipper didn’t stop unless he saw, at the very least, a pod of baitfish—runners, triggerfish and the like. When Hamilton eased off the throttle of the Almost Paradise, Willie and I would pitch a live bait or jig into the area. More often than not, eagle-eyed Eric put us on fish. One particularly fishy sheet of plywood also held a pair of tripletail in its shade; after several casts, one of the prehistoric-looking fish finally gobbled a sardine with a hook in it.

After icing down a few dolphin, typical schoolies in the 3- to 8-pound range, we started to get more selective, saving valuable fishing time by bypassing the more numerous peanut-size specimens.

A pair of polarizing sunglasses can be an important accessory for this kind of offshore window-shopping. The characteristic neon blue-green flash of a dolphin is otherwise hard to see through the glare. Elevation helps, too. Crews on big sportfishing boats have known this for years, but even the few extra feet of a console tower on trailerable craft, such as Hamilton’s 25-footer, gives a much better view. And ‘view’ doesn’t just mean distance from the boat. The higher you are, the deeper you can see, which means you won’t miss that larger fish skulking in the shadow of a drifting board, for example.