Photo by Ron Sinfelt

Over 40 years ago, when I was just cutting my angling teeth on nearby trout streams, one thing became clear one bright morning on one of my favorite streams. It was April and the water was still high, clear and cold, but slowly warming. I’d been dead-drifting a part of a night crawler and picking up an occasional rainbow and a hatchery brook trout or two. However, I could see other trout and for whatever reason, they were not attacking my bait as aggressively as normal.

MEPPS AGLIA
I switched to a maggot for bait, but the results were the same. Ditto for salmon eggs, a little action, but nothing to get too excited about. Finally, I decided to try a small 1/8-ounce Mepps Aglia spinner. I pitched the little spinner up into a churning plume of white water and started a slow retrieve that barely kept the lure just off the bottom. The Mepps hadn’t gone 2 feet when a savage strike almost jerked the little ultralight rod from my hands.

After landing the lively 13-inch rainbow, I thought, Well, let’s see whether that was a fluke hit or not. Two casts later, a dandy 11-inch native brook trout smashed the spinner. The rest of that morning that little Mepps lure had given me what, up until that time in my young angling career, one of those days that is indelibly etched in my memory.

This has largely been the case with hundreds of thousands of anglers around the world. Spinners should be an integral part of any serious trout fisherman’s arsenal. They come in a vast array of sizes, color combinations and blade types. They are easy to use, relatively cheap and catch incredible numbers of fish. Spinners are to fishing what frying pans are to cooking: pretty much indispensable!

Without a doubt, probably one of the finest spinners ever created is the venerable Mepps. Created by French engineer Andre Muelnart in 1938, the little lure enjoyed minor success in Europe, but what catapulted it to worldwide fame was a somewhat unusual turn of events. Todd Sheldon, who owned a successful tackle shop in Antigo, Wisconsin, had been having a tough day on the Wolf River in the spring of 1951, not too far from his shop.

After plying the Wolf River’s pools and runs for an hour or so with little to show for it, Sheldon finally decided to try a little lure friend Frank Velek, a World War II GI veteran who returned from Europe two years earlier, had given to him. A couple of hours and four trout later, Todd Sheldon was so convinced of the little lure’s trout appeal that he became an agent for Mepps spinners. Sheldon, after seeing the initial response that these lures generated in the Midwest, sold his store in 1956 and formed Sheldon’s Inc. to focus his attention on the import lure trade with the primary focus being on the full line of Mepps spinners.

The Mepps Aglia is the original French spinner. It is an in-line lure that makes use of a heavy-duty stainless steel shaft to which a concave oval blade is attached, along with a spinner body and a treble hook. The blade can be polished brass, copper or painted. Some models of the lure can also be adorned with plastic or solid brass beads. However, the pièce de résistance on the Mepps Aglia is a tuft of squirrel tail that adorns these lures and acts as a skirt above the treble hooks.