A month ago, Scotty Harris of Tremonton entered a fly-casting contest in St. George, where he was visiting his brother, Josh.

Even though he was far from his home fishing waters in northern Utah, and even though, at 13, he was the youngest person in the field, Scotty won the grand prize — an Alaskan fishing trip.

Amid the fist-bumping, high-fiving and yahooing that followed, Scotty knew he had to get to a phone.

"Hey, Grandpa," he said when 73-year-old Tip Ravsten came on the line at his home in Tremonton. "We're going to Alaska!"

With Father's Day coming up this Sunday, there are going to be a lot of stories about the importance of fathers. This one's about the importance of grandfathers.

Scotty and his grandpa started fishing together about a decade ago, when Scotty was 4 and Tip was retiring from his day job at Thiokol.

The timing couldn't have been better. Both had time to fish.

If it's true what they say, time spent fishing cannot be deducted from a man's life, for a bunch of years there, Scotty and Tip barely aged at all.

Two, three, sometimes four days a week they'd be over at Stillwater or Deep Creek or Devil's Creek, or whenever possible making their way upstream in Logan Canyon, their favorite. They caught and threw back more fish than "The American Sportsman." Some of 'em about as big as Scotty.

Everything Tip would do, so would Scotty.

"He watched me a lot and then I would tell him what he needed to do. I just taught him by showing him," says Tip.

But more than anything, he taught him by taking him along.

Tip didn't have to do it. Heaven knows, after a lifetime working construction and then at Thiokol, he had earned some solitude.

But the kid seemed to love it as much as the old man, and soon enough they were inseparable.

"Dad decided we were all going to raise this kid together," says Diana Harris, Scotty's mom and Ty's daughter. "He just said, 'This is going to be my child, too.' Every Monday they would go fishing for Grandpa Day. And then they started slipping in a Tuesday or a Wednesday."

Once Scotty started school, Tip would sometimes spring Scotty out of class, "until the school started cussing us," remembers Diana. "They'd go whenever they could. They'd love to sneak up Logan Canyon real fast. They could get up there, get fishing and get home before Mom got mad."

For several years, when Tip was leader of the High Priests in his LDS ward and had responsibility of caring for the widows, the calling doubled as a reason to go fishing.