Posted: Sun, 19 Jul 2009 09:34 PM - 16,459 Readers
By: Ray Sasser
Like many of mankind's breakthrough discoveries, Dennis Christian happened upon his ultimate white bass lure by accident. Even then, it took an engineer to make a logical but unlikely connection, then recognize the "aha" moment. Here's how it happened.
In 1976, Christian and his father-in-law, Ray Fowler, were fishing for whites at Lake Livingston. They were using slabs and other jigging-style spoons to tempt the huge schools of fish that cruised along the submerged U.S. Highway 190 roadbed. On this day, the fishing was slow.
Several boats were trolling through the area. Christian recognizes that trolling can be effective, but he considers the technique boring. One boat in particular caught a fish every time it passed close by. Christian knew the fish were there – he could see them on his depth finder, and he knew they were biting the trolling lure, probably something similar to the spoons they were jigging vertically.
"I got to thinking about what I could do to cast a lure that would emulate what the trolling lure was doing," recalls Christian, a retired Exxon engineer. "I opened my tackle box to see what I had that would look like a swimming minnow. My eye went to a silver, #2 Mepps Aglia spinner I had bought for trout fishing in Wyoming."
Christian tied the lightweight trout lure on and made a cast, allowing the lure to sink all the way to the bottom. He started a slow retrieve and immediately caught a nice fish. He caught another one on the next cast, then dug around in his tackle box and found a similar lure for his father-in-law, who also started catching fish.
For months afterward, Christian went white bass fishing with two rods – one rigged with a Mepps spinner and the other with a more traditional white bass lure, usually a slab spoon. The traditional lure still caught fish, just like it always did, but the in-line spinner always caught more fish, and not just at Lake Livingston.
Over the years, Christian tried the Mepps at Eagle Mountain Lake, Richland Chambers, Lake Limestone, Lake Whitney, Lake Buchanan, Lake Travis, Lake Tawakoni, Lake Waco, Lake Palestine and Cedar Creek Lake, where he's lived with his wife, Radene, since retiring in 2000.
"When we got ready to retire, we wanted to live on a lake with good white bass fishing," says Christian. "We wanted a metropolitan area nearby. We did our research, traveling around to various lakes, checking out available amenities and actually fishing. We stayed at a motel on Cedar Creek, and I went out fishing by myself one day and caught a lot of fish. Cedar Creek was the place for us."
Just for grins, Christian occasionally makes a side trip to other lakes, such as Waco, Tawakoni or Palestine. He seldom has a problem locating white bass, and he always catches them with the Mepps spinner. In more than 30 years, he's only seen one other angler fishing with a Mepps. When he asked him about it, the guy replied that he had learned the technique from a friend at Exxon, who, it turned out, had learned it from Christian.
In-line spinners are famous for versatility, but they've never been popular in southern impoundments where stumps and brush are abundant. Unlike the clothespin-style spinnerbait that's so popular with largemouth bass anglers, an in-line spinner is not weedless.
From 1976 through 1999, Christian figures he averaged catching about 1,250 white bass per year. Since retiring in 2000, he fishes a lot more often and catches a lot more fish, about 3,650 annually. That means Christian has caught approximately 65,000 white bass on Mepps spinners.
He's tried other in-line spinners, but none worked like the Mepps. No Mepps works better than the plain version (no buck tail) with a silver aglia blade in sizes 2, 3, 4 or 5.
"The #4 is the best size, but the #2 works best when the fish are feeding on small shad," Christian says. "These lures don't weigh much, so I use a quarter-ounce lead sinker clamped to my line about 13 inches above the spinner. Otherwise, it takes too long for the spinner to sink to the bottom."
Like most white bass specialists, Christian has learned that the fish bite best when they're ganged up in big schools over underwater ridges or humps that are 15 to 17 feet deep. He sometimes catches them on deeper structure, but they don't seem to bite as aggressively in the deeper water.
Christian uses 10-pound monofilament on a revolving spool reel. He lets the lure sink to the bottom, then reels it five or six cranks of the reel handle at a moderate speed. He then disengages the reel and lets the lure fall back to the bottom before repeating the process. He experiments with retrieve speed until he determines what works best on a given day.
Some days they want it fast. Other days they want it slow. The fish sometimes prefer the spinner swimming up off the bottom. They mostly bite it near the bottom.
Mepps claims to be the world's most popular fishing lure, and Christian catches a wide variety of fish on the small lures. He regularly catches catfish, freshwater drum, largemouth bass, yellow bass, crappie and hybrid stripers, but he's really fishing for white bass.
"The great thing about this technique is you don't have to get up early to catch fish," he says. "I catch them in the middle of the day. The great thing about Cedar Creek Lake is there are lots of fish and lots of great white bass structure. If they're not biting on one spot, I keep moving until I find a place where they are biting. I've never seen anyone other than my friends or family using this technique, and it's so effective, I want other anglers to know about it."
