Our friend Headwind is a senior fishing-doer, set in his ways. More stuck than set, some of our junior sportsman friends say irreverently.

“My ways are your ways. I taught you everything you know,” he reminds them irrelevantly.

“You taught us everything you know,” they’ll answer him. “Or knew. It’s not like we stopped when you finished. There was more. There’s always more.”

Headwind says our younger friends have a point. That’s almost like admitting they’re right.

“At some stage, we tend to get locked into what works for us, even if we only think it works for us,” he says when there’s no one around to take his open mind as a sign of weakness.

“Along the way, you get to fishing with the same people most of the time. They’re all doing what they always did too, because it used to work for them too.

“It still does, but not always. When it doesn’t, they keep at it instead of trying something they never tried before. If they do try something and it doesn’t work the first time, they discard it and go back to what wasn’t working before. We are creatures of habit.”

I glare at him, thinking “What do you mean, we?”

Headwind came south in the 1960s, when he could use a public phone for a dime, attendants pumped his gas, it took 15 minutes to drive to work and comic strip characters wore three-finger gloves.

He had neighbors who said “Miama.” Fort Lauderdale was infamous for spring break.

“You wouldn’t believe the fishing,” he’ll tell you if you’ll listen. “A boatless angler could hop from Miami to Bimini on the backs of fish without getting his knees wet. Billfish and dolphin would sit up and beg for bait, like puppies in training.

“On the inshore waters, sea trout and bonefish would fight over who got to climb on your boat first. What an unruly bunch. We refused to throw them a bait until they took a number and got in line.”

The hottest electronic marvel was a machine that you put a roll of sensitized paper into. The printout graph looked medical.

Saltwater fishing-doers threw jigs in the water and fished them aggressively with a retrieve known as the “Florida whip.”

That was all you had to learn unless you could afford to be a big game yachtsman. Headwind says hoi polloi like us didn’t have to be awfully skillful.

“If you didn’t find fish at your first stop, they would find you at the next one.” he says.

A fish just below the surface of Biscayne Bay would espy his 15-foot runabout and shout “Headwind is here!” It was like getting on the intercom at some middle school and yelling “The Beatles are here!”

On his first day off work in his new city, he visited Dude and Harry’s fishing supply store. He asked about size and bag limits and closed seasons.

Dude said “Huh?” Harry said “What?”

Jetskis weren’t invented yet. There were clueless fools with overpowered boats, but not more of them than us.

Headwind could launch at public marinas then without waiting for two or three other boats to move. If someone got in his way it was probably a mistake, not a challenge.

“You’re slipping off course,” Headwind just reminded me. “Wasn’t the point supposed to be about breaking old habits and trying different fishing methods?”

Oh, yeah. The wider point is that we have a lot more competition on the water now than in whenever your old days were. The narrower point is that we have to be more open to other fishing-doers’ ideas in case they’re good ones.

“Change happens. Either you roll along with it or it rolls over you,” Headwind likes to say.

On a recent trout fishing trip on Biscayne Bay, Headwind and I were silently surprised when our host, Capitano, grabbed our rods, cut our leaders in two and inserted popping cork rigs between the halves.

“You didn’t mention bringing live bait,” Headwind mentioned, thinking of shrimp. That’s what popping cork rigs were meant for. You cast the clumsy thing over a grass flat and retrieve it so it goes ploop, splash, ploop. That gets a fish’s attention. Then it notices the shrimp and grabs it.

“We’re using jigs,” Capitano said, tying on two lead heads painted white and dressed in pink nylon miniskirts — full length two inches.

Those are commonly known as pompano jigs, but many species see them as splendid appetizers. You can add a wiggly tail or stick a piece of shrimp or squid on the hook point for aroma and flavor.

Neither Headwind nor I had seen jigs used under a popping cork rig before. Neither of us had thought of it ourselves.

Before the invention of Styrofoam and its ilk, popping corks were real corks. Headwind, too lazy for serious research, supposes that the modern non-cork version is still called a cork because whoever thought it up lacked poetic license.

The foam version began as a simple white cone, about the size of a man’s thumb, painted with a red stripe and paired with a green straw to thread a leader through it. You did and still do have to add your own weights and beads, which you don’t have to do but should.

Neither Headwind nor I can recall what Dude and Harry’s price was in biblical times. No more than half a dollar, we guess. Harry’s son Harry still sells those for $1.25 and up, depending on size.

You’re probably thinking that’s old fashioned. It is and that’s nice, but it appeals more to nostalgians, luddites and cane pole worm dunkers than to sophisticated, high-nosed sportsmen like us. We lean toward the fancy stuff, at $4 and change.

Capitano rigged our rods with bright orange oval-shaped versions that come with stems of stiff wire instead of a plastic straw. Swivels may already be attached and there are red or green plastic beads that go clickety-click when the float is jerked (ploop, ploop) through the water.

Headwind mentioned to Capitano that if he listens carefully to shrimp swimming, he might hear them keeping time, clickety-click, with their jointed shells.

Capitano nodded as if he knew that.

On that Saturday our crew brought aboard a legal size trout and a few mangrove snapperitos small enough to serve as bait. The bite was slow and the boat traffic was fast — a good alibi if we wanted to assert one.

“It’s why I avoid city fishing on weekends if I can go during the week,” Headwind said later. Everybody who can’t go during the week is out there on Saturday and Sunday, joyriding if they’re not fishing.

“I wonder if the fish we were after even heard our baits going ploop ploop and clickety-click, what with all the engine noise everyone else was making,” Capitano said.

He also wondered if the fish did hear what they were supposed to hear, but were frightened off their feed by the wakes of all the other boats and jetskis.

To demonstrate that he was all in on the program, Headwind dug into his kit and pulled out a streamer fly that he had made to resemble a pilchard or sardine.

“It’s good to see that the old guy’s mind is open,” Capitano whispered to me.

Omitting the obscene three-letter o-bomb, I whispered it to Headwind. He giggled as his fly wiggled, unbitten:

“Well, it’s a little bit ajar.”

Feedback: fishingdoer@gmail.com