I don't know if this applies to your neck of the woods, but sometimes at this local, small lake, the bass will get on the leeward sides of things for protection from the wind. Sometimes they just don't like all that ripple on the water. If there's no bait being blown onto the structure, there's no reason for the bass to be on the windward side, so they probably prefer to take shelter. If bait is present however, then they'll probably want to position themselves to eat it. I'd imagine in the keys there's not as much bait as there is on the main lake structure, to be blow around, so the bass probably had no reason to position themselves to catch bait. Another thing that could've happened with the wind on the docks is that maybe the fish could just see your senko better on the leeward side than on the windward side. Maybe they couldn't quite identify it as "food" with all the ripple and light defraction and what not, but once they got a clean look at it out of the wind, they liked what they saw. Just my $.01.
-Brian