Ultimate Kayak Fishing: Ultimate Kayak Fishing -> Fake Fishing

I was visiting my folks in MA yesterday, and found myself on a walk to the lake with my 4-year-old nephew Sam and my girlfriend. We got to the lake and threw a few stones into the water, waiting for inspiration.

We spotted a big orange'n'yellow bobber floating in the water, and I said "gee if I had my fishing rod we could catch some bass here!" We found a long branch and we used it to get the bobber out, and Sam said "what do you want it for?"

"I don't know, I just want to mess around with it, but we have to be careful there's still a hook on it"

He said "A hook? Why don't we use it for fishing?" I said "Because we don't have any bait."
He looked kinda bummed out so I said we could make a "fly" out of a duck feather, and we did, and we tied it to the end of the long branch. Sam tossed it forward into the water, sat down, and said "This is gonna take a while."

He sat watching the "fly" waiting for a fish, just as patiently as the times we've fished together with real bait. To him, this fake fishing was just as good as any fishing you could find, on that lake or any other.

Of course the end of the story is we didn't catch any fish, but we went fishing. And we took our shoes and socks off and rolled up our pants, he was sure we could swim to the other side. We got in just a few inches past our ankles, and our feet froze almost instantly, and we pretended that we just noticed that there was still plenty of ice on the lake. We got back to my parents house, and everyone said "Of course you went in the water. We knew you would, we said so the minute you left." How did you know?