That’s the title of a new book, written by Ed Van Put, and released by Skyhorse Publishing in June of this year. Sadly, Ed passed away in December 2024, so this was his last.

Like most of us who were predestined to become anglers, Ed began to fish when he was a lad of about 10. Early trips were to the Passaic River for carp, using a 5-foot baitcasting rod. When Ed’s family moved from Fair Lawn, NJ to Hawthorne, Ed saw bluegills feeding on flies in a local pond. That inspired him to think about fishing with dry flies, resulting in the purchase of an 8.5-foot bamboo fly rod. 

Shortly thereafter, he visited the Patterson Rod and Gun Store and bought a fly reel, line and leader. That store was owned by Jimmy Salvato, Joan Wulff’s father. 

Later, he added a selection of trout-style dry flies to his equipment. 

As he matured, Ed honed his fly fishing skill by fishing for bluegills in Pompton Lakes. During his teenage years, Ed did not fish for trout, even though there were stocked streams nearby. At the time, he did not understand the philosophy of raising trout in hatcheries, growing those fish and then releasing them into local streams to be caught. Even in those early years Ed had a philosophical problem with fishing for stocked trout. Fortunately, through a variety of media outlets, Ed learned that some local streams actually held wild trout, even in New Jersey! 

With that information in hand, Ed fished the Flat Brook, where he caught his first wild trout, on a Mosquito dry fly. Eventually, he learned about the excellent trout fishing in the Catskills, so it wasn’t long before he began weekly jaunts to the Esopus, Schoharie, Beaverkill and Willowemoc. Rather than continue these trips, to be closer to the fishing, Ed moved to the Catskills in 1965, where it didn’t take him long to find that Elsie and Harry Darbee were right down the road. Years later, Ed attributed his success as a fly tyer to the instruction he received from the Darbees and Dettes.

In 1969, Ed was hired by the Conservation Department as a fisheries technician. His first job was to conduct an angler census along Willowemoc Creek. Although the hours were long, the time spent interviewing anglers provided Ed with a good background in note-taking, which may have influenced his writing years later. Being on the water for so many hours also provided Ed with an opportunity to observe a lot of aquatic insect activity and monitor trout-feeding behavior. That’s when he began to realize that fishing with flies had become overcomplicated, and only a few fly patterns were necessary to consistently catch trout. I think part of his philosophy was based on an experiment that he conducted. When Ed found a steadily rising trout, he would toss a small object just upstream of the fish. He found that the trout would almost always take and quickly reject the object, even though it did not imitate real food. He also learned through countless interviews that during large hatches, anglers caught trout on a variety of flies, most of which did not match the flies on the water. 

As Ed evolved as a fly fisherman, he started to keep a diary in which he entered a variety of data. And while he kept diaries for many years, he explained that he never referred to them until he decided to write this book. 

This is what he found: from 1972 through 2001, Ed caught 6668 trout—72 percent on an Adams, 5.6 percent on a Pheasant Tail Midge, 5.8 percent on the Chuck Caddis and 3.3 percent on a Royal Wulff. That information, my fellow anglers, should tell you a great deal about how few fly patterns one needs to catch a lot of trout!

While “A Fly Fisher’s Revelations” covers a variety of topics—in addition to a history of Ed’s formative years, and that he caught thousands of trout—anglers must pay particularly close attention to Chapter 8: “Presentation and Fishing with Confidence.” I won’t elaborate on the content, except to say that anglers that cannot present their flies accurately without spooking trout, and anglers who do not have ultimate confidence in the flies with which they fish, will have a great deal of difficulty catching trout. Those same anglers will continually change flies when it’s likely it wasn’t the fly in the first place.

There’s a lot of very useful information in “A Fly Fishers Revelations,” much of it not written before. That being said, for those anglers who can take away from this very fine book that accurate casting and presentation, ultimate confidence in the flies they use, and a few special patterns will catch plenty of trout. In fact, they will catch a lot more trout than those anglers who go forth with any number of fly boxes and thousands of flies, only to change flies every five minutes when a trout refuses a pattern.  

Ed’s wife Judy was kind enough to provide me with a copy of the book, which she inscribed, during an outing in June with some of her and Ed’s old DEC associates. I’m very grateful for her gift, and it rests in my small library, next to “Trout Fishing in the Catskills” and “The Beaverkill.” 

I miss you my friend, and still see you at dusk, line in the air, off the mouth of Bouchoix Brook, where it all started!