I am new to the club and this is the third lake I have fished.  I have fished the McKinney SW site (April 17) and Twin Lakes (April 20).  At McKinney despite the rain and cold weather which cut our trip short, I managed to land one just under six pounds.  Twin lakes has lots of solid 2-5 pounders healthy and agressive.  Over 50 fish half-day.  A beautiful setting.
Grapeland Bennett is such an amazing isolated location.  You don’t even get signal for your cell phone here.  Since this is one of the bigger bodies of water in the club, it fishes more like a big lake where you have to work a little harder reading wind a weather patterns as you put together a strategy.  We had a beautiful partly sunny hot day with a lot of wind due to a front pushing in.  I started out with a crank bait to cover lots of water and get a feel for the lake and what the fish might be doing and caught a good number of solid 2 and 3 pound fish.  These were the most aggressive and fiesty bass I have ever come across.  The two pounders here fight like all get out which made for a memorable experience.  I couldn’t get over how strong and healthy these bass were which attributes to how well this site is being managed.  Once my guest and I caught a few, we slowed down and swithced gears and baits looking for a big bite.  I was concentrating my efforts on the big bass pot, which did get bigger bites, but only managed to get one just shy of 5 pounds flipping and pitching a jig.  This lake has an abundance of shoreline cover and overhangs which makes pitching a jig really fun (my favorite technique).  We went back and forth between catching numbers when bored and looking for big bites.  Any bait works good here.  Throw what you have confidence in and you will catch fish.  Scale down plastics for numbers and switch to big baits for size.  We only caught 10 within the slot and a couple of dinks, which tells me this lake is being managed right.  This was a half day trip from noon till dusk and I figured we caught around 50 fish and probably lost half that many.  We even caught two big catfish over five pounds which was fun.
The water here is stained but good clarity.  It is not tea- colored like your typical east texas lake and the bass are light colored and not that deep green like most.
I really fell in love with this site with the abundance of surface acres, deep water and forage, it’s just the right combination to produce some serious monster bass.  There will be some records coming out of here and I look forward to coming back especially next years spawn.  The boat is great and set up nicely.  It is worth the drive from Dallas.  I look forward to being a member and fishing more.  Thanks to Brian and Keri for all your help and answering my questions and getting me hooked up.  I’m sure you got tired of my phone calls and questions.  Let me know if I can ever help out in any way.  Sorry for the long and detailed report, but I always like to here about how well a site is doing before I go to it.  Also, there is a great pizza joint hole in the ground in Elkhart that serves everything that is awesome eats.  I forget the name of it.

Thanks again- Tiger