If you’ve been dolphin fishing much and not catching much, don’t invest or bet money on anything. Your luck is awful. Everybody else is tearing ‘em up. Lots of cooler-fillers are heading home early, excited about the imminent drudgery of filleting.

In addition to the usual schoolies, less than 2 feet long, gaffers have been abundant almost anywhere you can find a decent patch of floating Sargasso — lots of that out there — or a flock of low-flying birds, even one bird.

Another way to know how good a summer this is for dolphin is to follow the monthly tagging and recapture reports from Wessley Merten at the Dolphinfish Research Program. It covers the Florida- Georgia-South Carolina range and the Antilles.

The July report says 44 participating boats reported tagging and releasing 663 dolphin in June — “the fourth highest number tagged in June for the program since 2002.”

Twenty percent of the tagged and released fish were longer than 20 inches, nose to tail fork. That is the minimum keeper size in Florida, Georgia and South Carolina waters. Mertens said the release of so many legal keepers shows that many fishing-doers are dedicated to conservation.

It could indicate also what offshore fishing-do-ers have been seeing, that big bull and cow dolphin are so plentiful this season. Just a few boatings can feed the whole crew and anyone they owe a favor.

Dolphinfish Research Program sponsors all that tagging for a variety of data. The most impressive stuff we see documents dolphins’ rapid growth (about an inch per week) and travel. Almost constantly on the feed and on the move, they’ll swim hundreds of miles and dive hundreds of feet for a meal.

Here’s Merten on that: “In addition to dolphin and ocean conservation benefits, the uptick in tagging activity led to more movement results, and to date the program has received 22 recapture reports that provide some truly remarkable results.

“Along only the eastern Florida shelf in June, the average movement rate for dolphin was 55.46 miles per day, which is 21 percent faster than last year’s average (43.71 miles) and faster than any previous year on record.

“Many anglers have reported that they felt schools were moving fast and results to date corroborate their intuition.”

Texas oilman Don Gates and his Killin’ Time II Fishing Team, home-ported at Cudjoe Key, made eight tagging voyages in June and found all the dolphin they could handle. They reported catching, tagging and releasing 316 fish — 13 of them recaptured in time for Mertens to report in the July newsletter.

Dolphin will eat almost any bait, natural or artificial, especially if there’s a crowd of them. Cast a bucktail, feather or nylon jig alongside a weedline and you can hear them shouting:

“I got it!”

“Mine!”

“Dibs! Dibs!”

Here’s the sick part: They’ll even eat one another.

Mertens reported the experience of commercial fisherman Edwin Medina Feliz of Barahona in the Dominican Republic. On June 23, he caught a 25-pound dolphin (a dorado in his lingo). Inside it he found a Dolphinfish Research Program tag that had been stuck to a 20-incher on April 25 near Guadeloupe — 614 miles and 59 days before — by Julien Brossel, a charter captain in St. Claude, Guadeloupe.

“This is the first event to physically connect dolphinfish that occur in the Lesser Antilles with the Greater Antilles and also provides us a record of the ferocious cannibalistic nature of this epic fish,” Merten reported. “It is also the longest recovery for a tagged dolphinfish in the Caribbean Sea to date.”