Craig McDonald's Duracell Nymph was an instant success the first time I took it for a spin several years ago. It was early July on North Central Washington's Methow River and the river had dropped into that perfect "not too high, not too low" flow that we anxiously await each summer. Caddis swarmed the bankside willows, annoyingly crawling inside the lenses of my polarized glasses and sometimes flying into my mouth. The Duracell Nymph fished along the bottom and in smaller sizes fished as a dropper beneath a Chubby Chernobyl could do no wrong. It caught big rainbows and westslope cutthroat all day long. I've had similar experiences with the pattern throughout the west from Colorado to Idaho and it's become my go-to nymph, particularly throughout the summer.
As far as I can tell, if there's one feature of the Duracell that stands out as a key fish-fooling material it's the UV brown Ice Dubbing used the body. It's an interesting color that matches a lot of caddis pupae and various mayfly nymphs and maintains an oddly attractive purplish UV glow in the water. Nymphing certainly has its place and is no doubt one of the most effective ways to catch obscene numbers of trout, especially on a euro rig. Sometimes, however, when lots of bugs abound near the surface and trout are suspended higher in the water column to feed on them, fishing deep is not the best course of action. I wanted an unweighted pattern that could fish near the surface when trout are clearly looking up, but that still had that magically unequivocal power of the Duracell Nymph. So I tied a soft hackle. Swinging soft hackles on a light trout spey is one of my all-time favorite summer tactics. Afterall, fly fishing is a contest of fun rather than numbers, and at its core, is about catching fish the way you want to rather than employing the deadliest means possible.
So try swinging the Duracell Soft Hackle either by itself or as a trailer fly behind a small streamer. You can also fish it as a dropper off of a dry fly during a hatch when fish are slurping emergers in the film. Fish it how you like, and make no mistake; that distinctive Ice Dubbing hue in the body still captivates trout from the cobbled stream bottom all the way to the riffled surface. I really like simplicity of sparse partridge for the hackle on my soft hackles, but don't be afraid to spin a loop of dun-colored CDC behind the partridge if you want to fancy it up. That version works really well too.
Duracel Soft Hackle Recipe:
Hook: #12-16 Daiichi 1150
Thread: 8/0 Red Semperfli Classic Waxed Thread
Tail: Partridge Fibers
Rib: Small Red Ultra Wire
Body: UV Brown Ice Dubbing
Hackle: Partridge