KENNEBUNKPORT – Trying to defrost U.S.-Russia relations, Russian President Vladimir Putin graciously said the bass he caught on a fishing trip Monday with President Bush was a “team effort.”

But he followed up the compliment with a small gaffe. Putin assigned the wrong number to the presidency of Bush’s father, former President George H.W. Bush.

“We had a very nice fishing party this morning,” Putin said. “We caught one fish, but that was a team effort, and we let it go to the captain.”

He was referring to Bush’s 83-year-old dad, who was at the wheel of the boat. Putin mistakenly said he was the 42nd president of the United States, not the 41st.

Neither Bush seem bothered, and the current president said it was “very thoughtful” of Putin to share credit for the catch.

“A fine catch,” the president said about the striped bass that his father said was about 30 inches long.

You had to take the former president’s word for it.

“Mind you, the fish that we caught, we’ve let it free,” Putin said.

The elder Bush said he was trying to be incognito.

Right. A former leader of the free world ambling toward a pack of reporters and photographers trampling his damp lawn and nobody would notice?

“I put my dark glasses on so nobody would know who I was,” Bush joked.

“We’re not trying to get in on the act,” he said of himself and former first lady Barbara Bush.

Within minutes, he was holding court, fielding questions about the minisummit wrapping up inside his house between President Bush and Russian President Putin.

The elder Bush took the two leaders on a morning fishing trip in his speedboat, Fidelity III.

He said he once had cranked his boat, with three outboard motors, up to “70 miles per hour with three people aboard and a half a tank of gas.” He also said the navy-and-white boat with red stripes was going to be his last boat.

“Promise?” Barbara Bush asked.

Asked if he joined in on the talks, Bush responded: “I don’t give advice. I’m too old for that.

“I’m 83 years old,” he said. “I feel good, though. I’m blessed with good health.”

He confessed that his golf game has suffered over the years. He said he used blame it on a bad hip, but that excuse is no longer available since he got his left hip replaced in 2000 and got a new right hip in January.

“I’ve gotten so bad in golf,” he said. “I used to be a fair golfer.”

When reporters and photographers jumped out of a half-dozen vans at the Bush family estate to see Presidents Bush and Putin, they might have thought they were in Texas.

The first thing they saw were statues of life-size cows. They were white. They had horns and udders. Mysteriously, they were covered in handprints that had been dipped in colored paint.

It was an odd sight at the Bush summer home.

It’s well-known that the current Oval Office holder prefers his Texas ranch to his parents’ digs in the Northeast, but Texas cows in Kennebunkport?

Turns out the president’s parents bought the cow sculptures in an auction in Houston in 2001. The White House didn’t say how much they cost, but said the proceeds went to the Texas Children’s Hospital.

The fish were biting in Kennebunkport, but President Bush wasn’t taking any bait.

After a press conference with Putin, a television reporter bellowed: “Is Cheney a member of the executive branch?”

The reporter was trying to get Bush to weigh in on the dispute with the Democratic Congress, which is demanding information from the White House and Vice President Dick Cheney.

Recently, Cheney, who has a penchant for secrecy, insisted that his office was exempt from sections of a presidential order directing executive branch offices to provide data on actions they take to classify information and how many pages they declassify.

Cheney’s office, with backing from the White House, argued that the offices of the president and vice president were exempt from the order because they are not executive branch “agencies.”

The reporter shouted the question as Bush and Putin were walking away from the microphones. The query came across loud and clear, but Bush responded, “I didn’t hear you.”