Patrick 1 -- Daddy 0?

Sunday afternoon, and I decide to take Patrick down to the lake to kill a little time. We belly up to the railing behind the LCRA's headquarters building at the bottom of Lake Austin, and before I have the fly rod unlimbered I see the first carp: it's a big one, playing hide-and-seek with the shadow of the dock at Hula Hut.

Patrick, meanwhile, is busy contemplating an earthworm someone left to dry on the concrete bulkhead. I cast between gusts of wind and one of several large carp -- a couple are in the 30-pound class -- mouths my fly before I strip it away. It will be the nearest-miss of the day.

Patrick decides he'll fish and makes a great first cast, right into the shadow of the dock, alongside a large, waterlogged tree limb. Several cranks into his retrieve and he announces something heavy is on the end of his line. I look down and see a flash of silver.

"Like, maybe a fish?" I ask.

"Oh yeah," he answers, "I have a fish!"

Patrick does a masterful job of keeping his rod tip high and his line tight as he negotiates the steps down to the lake-level landing. By himself, for the first time, he lips the bass and holds it up to be admired.

Lunch-goers at Hula Hut break into cheers and applause. Patrick gives an "aw-shucks" grin. I talk him through releasing the fish. I cast a few more times at the now utterly uninterested carp, Patrick observes the progression of crustiness in the discarded earthworm before deciding to commit it to the lake's food chain.

"You could use it as bait," I suggest. "It might catch a catfish."

"Why would I want to catch a catfish?" Patrick (now a many-bass-redfish-drum-trout-rainbow-and-speckled-ladyfish-mangrove snapper veteran) asks me.

My son has a point, I must concede, and rather than explain that some people fish for catfish, in fact pursue catfish with the fervor of a dedicated snook or striper angler, I silently pack up our gear.

On the way back to the truck, four times Patrick is stopped and congratulated on his catch. The shy grin reappears, and about the time we hit the parking lot he claps me on my lower back, as high as he can reach, and says: "It's okay Daddy. You usually catch a lot of fish."

He's done this before, provided comfort as eau de skunk wafts off me.

He's turning into the kind of angler I'll want to fish with. Not because he's my kid, but the kind -- like my friends Kendal and Dean and Brandon and Bobby -- who rejoices in another fisherman's good fortune and manages to remain modest about his own.

Which really makes the "score" irrelevant; we all win.