I kept looking over my shoulder at Terry, wondering how in the blazes he kept hooking up with fish after fish while I flopped one fishless cast after another twenty yards from his offerings.

I gritted my teeth and smiled when he reeled in another thrashing redfish. We slowly waded across the sandy bottoms and through the wide grass flats of Lower Laguna Madre, the boat anchored a hundred yards behind us.

While drift-fishing from the boat earlier in the morning, I managed to catch a nice red, a couple of speckled trout and a flounder. Since we had left the boat, my luck had run out, and as we waded across the flats, shuffling our feet to spook stingrays, I rationalized that I shouldn't be caught up in the numbers game -- that this wasn't about catching fish.

The truth is this: Anyone who regularly fishes knows it shouldn't be about catching fish. I know that, but it had become just that. When you hear someone say fishing is fun even if you're not catching fish, I can promise you he or she has either had the best catching day of their lives or they're in the middle of being skunked.

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Terry and the guide pretended not to notice I had not landed a fish in hours. They jeered me when I finally did hook up with a big bull pulling like a freight train, only to lose it after five minutes of tug of war, the rod's lazy curve flicked straight by the snap of the tippet.

Somewhere in the afternoon, I got caught up in the rhythm of Terry's casting, his gentle, wet swoosh of the line, the fluorescent orange cutting across the azure skies like a laser beam. As the day faded, the emerald water and the blue sky merged into grayness, the horizon and distant ocean becoming one.

"It's not about catching fish," Terry and I joked later at the bar. After all, he just had the best fishing day of his life and I'd been roundly skunked, so somewhere in the middle, like the sky and horizon, we understood why we were qualified to rationalize that awkward but honest credo.

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