Vern Evans
There’s no denying that smallmouth bass attract attention from anglers nationwide. From their beautiful patterns, aggressive strikes, and drag-peeling fights, it’s easy to see why. Smallmouth are voracious feeders, targeting anything from crayfish to alewives to invasive gobies. Frankly, there’s not much they won’t eat. They’re also known for their tenacious attitude once hooked, and after years of experience catching them alongside largemouth, I believe they’ve earned their title as the best-fighting bass, pound for pound.
Thankfully, I live in the Northeast, a hotbed for smallmouth lakes, rivers, and streams. I’ve grown up catching these incredible fish and have chased them across the country in tournaments since. I’ve compiled a list of the seven best trophy smallmouth waters for bass anglers who haven’t had the privilege of living in smallmouth country but want to get in on the action.
Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River
At a Glance
- Size: Lake Ontario covers 7,320 square miles and the St. Lawrence River is 743 miles long
- Lake Record: 9.00 pounds
- Best Tactics: Ned Rig and Drop Shot
I’m starting with my favorite smallmouth fishery, Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River. They offer an immense amount of fishable water, and they’re both chock-full of smallmouth bass.
The two water bodies fall between New York and Ontario, making them a popular destination for both U.S. anglers and Canadian anglers. If you find yourself visiting the area, be sure to bring your passport, and know that an Ontario fishing license is required when fishing in Canadian waters and a New York fishing license is needed in American waters. Thankfully, both can be obtained quickly and easily online.
What makes these bodies of water produce so many trophy smallmouth is a combination of food and space to roam. Since invasive round gobies were introduced sometime in the late 90s or early 2000s, the average size of the smallmouth bass exploded. For smallmouth, gobies are the equivalent of a protein bar, and they eat a ton of them.
Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence river tops the list of the best trophy smallmouth waters in the U.S. due to the sheer size and number of smallmouth available to catch. But don’t take my word for it. Take a look at the results of the Bassmaster Elite Series. For the past three years, the four-day events have required over 100 pounds of smallmouth to win. For those not familiar with tournament fishing, that’s an average of over 5 pounds per smallmouth weighed in. No other body of water in the country puts out those kinds of numbers, making this the top choice for anglers looking to catch the smallmouth of a lifetime.
How to Catch Smallmouth on Lake Ontario
Once you’ve booked your trip, you’re surely going to start researching the lake and river to see what it has to offer topographically. What you’re going to find is that it can be a bit overwhelming. There are islands everywhere, underwater shoals, and deep basins galore, offering the smallmouth plenty of places to feed and hide.
In my experience, the best way to target smallmouth here has been to target shoals in the 10- to 20-foot range with Ned rigs, drop shots, and even Carolina rigs during the dog days of summer. These shoals provide the perfect feeding grounds for smallmouth to gorge themselves on the plethora of round goby that now call this place home.
The current flowing North into the river creates an eddy for the bass to stage in and wait for unsuspecting prey to drift by, and that’s where you’ll want to target. Focus your casting on the down-current side of these massive shoals and hang on tight because these bass know how to fight using the strong current.
A final tip for your trip to Lake Ontario is to watch the winds. The lake and, subsequently, the river can get nasty. You don’t want to be caught out on the lake with 7-footers crashing down on the bow. Typically, if there’s a strong wind from the West, it’s best to find a back bay to hide further up the river.
Lake Erie
At a Glance
- Size: Lake Erie covers 9,940 square miles
- Lake Record Smallmouth: 10.15 pounds
- Best Tactics: Tube, Drop Shot, and Blade Bait
As the fourth largest Great Lake, Lake Erie is one of the best places in the world to target trophy smallmouth, and if the average size were bigger, it would give Lake Ontario a run for its money, at least in my mind. Nowhere else can you show up and catch 50 to 100 smallmouth a day for 4 or 5 days in a row consistently.
Due to its size, Erie offers smallmouth plenty of room to roam and avoid the immense fishing pressure that comes every spring and summer. Similarly to Lake Ontario, the invasive round goby is also prevalent in the lake and has caused the average size of these smallmouth to explode.
The biggest problem with goby is that they’re nest invaders, which means that during the spawn, they’re constantly pestering bedded smallmouth, attempting to eat their eggs and fry. While they’ve caused a boom in smallmouth size across the North, it’s worth noting that they are still invasive and detrimental to the fishery as a whole.
For the time being, it seems as though the smallmouth have adjusted, and the population in Lake Erie remains healthy. Whether you’re fishing out of Buffalo in New York, Erie in Pennsylvania, or in and around Sandusky, Ohio, there are plenty of 3 to 4-pound smallies ready to take your bait.
How to Catch Smallmouth on Lake Erie
When you’re rigging up for your trip on Lake Erie, you’d be remiss not to tie up a Ned rig or drop shot, but one of my top baits for Erie is actually a tube. I’ve found that snapping a tube along the shelf lines in 20 to 30 feet of water produces some of the bigger bites you can get into on Lake Erie.
Obviously, during the month of May, the smallmouth push shallow into the bays and are incredibly easy to catch. In June and July, they push out into the main lake and stage on deep rock ledges and shelf lines, waiting for the wind to blow unsuspecting baitfish their way.
If snapping a tube just isn’t for you, no worries. You can also catch a pile of fish on a blade bait, especially if the water temps are in the 40s and 50s. Frankly, no matter what you want to tie up, you’ll probably end up getting a bite. There are thousands upon thousands of smallmouth swimming around in Lake Erie, you just need to get your bait in front of one.
Lake St. Clair
At a Glance
- Size: Lake St. Clair covers 430 square miles
- Lake Record Smallmouth: 9.72 pounds
- Best Tactics: Crankbaits and Paddletail Swimbaits
If you’re a smallmouth angler, having Lake St. Clair on this list should come as no surprise. Nestled between Lake Erie and Lake Huron, St. Clair receives water from Lake Huron via the St. Clair River, and flows south via the Detroit River into Lake Erie. In essence, it’s the middle ground between two Great Lakes that massive smallmouth like to call home.
Admittedly, I’ve spent much less time on Lake St. Clair than the other two bodies of water listed above. But I’d certainly love to go back. St. Clair is one of the more unique smallmouth fisheries I’ve ever been on. Rather than the typical rock shelves and giant boulders littering the bottom, Lake St. Clair is primarily a sand bottom that hosts some aquatic vegetation for the smallmouth to call home.
While some offshore rock piles and shoals are loaded with bass, they can be heavily pressured by other anglers, making the grass lines a hotbed for unsuspecting and hungry smallmouth.
How to Catch Smallmouth on Lake St. Clair
Through my own experience, along with watching plenty of professional bass fishing tournament coverage, the smallmouth in Lake St. Clair love to school up and feed all at once. This creates bite windows throughout the day on the water, but you can always try to incite your own feeding frenzy.
Tubes, drop shots, and paddletail swimbaits are great ways to trick Lake St. Clair smallmouth into biting, but one of the best ways to catch a pile of smallies is a crankbait. Due to the composition of the bottom, a deep diving crankbait wreaks havoc underwater, kicking up sand and debris as you wind it back to the boat. That havoc seems to fire up the smallmouth unlike any other bait, which causes a feeding frenzy.
To find the right area to crank, you’ll simply need to do some graphing with your electronics to find a grass line or contour change where a school is staging. From there, chunk and wind your crankbait through the school and hang on tight.
Mille Lacs Lake
At a Glance
- Size: Mille Lacs Lake covers 207 square miles
- Lake Record Smallmouth: 7.50 pounds
- Best Tactics: Drop Shot and Chatterbaits
Mille Lacs is a prime destination for midwestern smallmouth fishing, like Lake Ontario is smallie heaven for northeastern smallmouth anglers. In other words, it’s a special fishery, brimming with shallow water smallmouth fishing opportunities. But, more than anything, the size of the smallmouth in Mille Lacs is what keeps anglers coming back.
While the lake is anything but small, it does clock in as the smallest body of water on my list thus far, making the number and size of bass even more impressive. With baitfish galore, it’s not surprising that these smallmouth are so big, but I think Mille Lacs’ shallow water keeps the population so healthy.
Since there’s so much shallow water for these smallmouth to roam, they rarely get congregated in a specific area. This decreases the fishing pressure and allows these voracious predators to live long lives with full bellies.
How to Catch Smallmouth on Mille Lacs Lake
Having never been there myself, I can really only speculate as to what works well based on professional tournament coverage, which I’ve watched a lot of. And while the Elite’s haven’t been back in recent years, I still fully recollect how the likes of Combs, Feider, and Lee caught their bags.
For each angler, the key was targeting large boulders off the bank in 10- to 20-feet of water. These boulders provide a great ambush spot for smallmouth to call home, and they also provide an eddy if the wind picks up and creates a current in the lake.
To catch these boulder dwellers, anglers had success with the typical smallmouth baits like drop shots, paddletail swimbaits, and crankbaits, but one that really stuck out to me was a chatterbait. Due to how shallow most of the lake is, a heavier ½-ounce or even ¾-ounce chatterbait was able to get deep enough in the water column to target smallmouth on these boulders. Many anglers reported that they simply needed to run their moving baits into the boulder to trigger a deflection, and the smallmouth would strike almost immediately.
Cayuga Lake
At a Glance
- Size: Cayuga Lake covers 66 square miles
- Lake Record Smallmouth: 9.04 pounds
- Best Tactics: Swimbaits, Jigs, and Damiki Rigs
Next, we’re headed back to the Northeast and into the Finger Lakes region of New York. Cayuga Lake might just be a bass anglers paradise, and it feels like it every time you back your boat into the water. On the North end of the lake lies a giant grass flat full of massive largemouth, but mid-lake and South near Ithaca is where the magnum smallmouth roam.
Cayuga Lake is deceptively small, at least in surface area, but what it lacks in surface area, it makes up for with deep water and giant smallmouth. The smallmouth here love to school up on deep grass lines, points, and rock ledges, allowing anglers to get on a school and catch a ton of bass in a hurry.
The best part about the smallmouth fishing though, is that at any moment, you could hook into a healthy 4- or 5-pound largemouth as well. And who doesn’t love a mixed bag of big bass?
How to Catch Smallmouth on Cayuga Lake
As I mentioned above, the best areas to target smallmouth in Cayuga Lake are the mid-lake region extending down towards the town of Ithaca. This portion of the lake seems to offer more of a rocky bottom composition compared to the North flat, giving the smallmouth ample opportunity to feed on small perch and other baitfish.
The best way I’ve found to target these schools of smallmouth has been a drop shot. Now, that might seem repetitive at this point, but it’s the truth. If that doesn’t tickle your fancy, anglers have also done well fishing swimbaits, jigs, and Damiki rigs. Realistically, once you find the school, your best bet is to throw a variety of baits at them until they key in on one. Then, don’t put it down until they stop biting.
Lake Champlain
At a Glance
- Size: Lake Champlain covers 490 square miles
- Lake Record Smallmouth: 6.75 pounds
- Best Tactics: Drop Shot and Strolling
Lake Champlain may not host the biggest smallmouth in the world, but what it lacks in size, it makes up for in sheer numbers. The average smallmouth here is probably somewhere in the 2.5- to 3-pound range, and there are tons of them.
Lake Champlain offers anglers 490 square miles of premium smallmouth and largemouth fishing along the New York and Vermont border. The fishery offers a variety of options for anglers to target, such as sprawling grass flats near Ticonderoga, deep water rock basins, and islands near Plattsburgh.
For anglers with smallmouth on the mind, I would recommend the Plattsburgh region of the lake as a starting point. The islands here provide lots of feeding opportunities, and the inland sea, as locals call it, offers current for smallmouth to stack up on and feed on alewives until they’re content.
How to Catch Smallmouth on Lake Champlain
To avoid sounding like a broken record, I’ll simply state that the typical smallmouth techniques and lures will surely get the job done at Champlain. But, as I learned on a recent trip over the summer with my friends at Shimano, a new technique called strolling while using forward facing sonar (FFS) is taking the lake by storm.
This simple, yet effective technique hones in on a smallmouth’s desire to feed up in the water column. To maximize your opportunity for bites, find areas of the lake that have schools of alewives, and the smallmouth won’t be far behind. Once you’ve located the alewives, find the individual smallmouth using FFS and cast the strolling rig directly to the bass. Once they see your rig slowly working through the water column, they can’t help themselves.
Susquehanna River
At a Glance
- Size: The Susquehanna River is over 400 miles long
- River Record Smallmouth: Over 6-pounds
- Best Tactics: Drop Shot and Strolling
Last but certainly not least is a pick that might send some smallmouth fanatics into a tizzy. But, they’ll just have to trust me on this one. The Susquehanna River is a world-class smallmouth fishery. Starting in New York and running over 400 miles to the Chesapeake Bay, this river system is brimming with smallmouth bass.
What makes the Susquehanna so special is its accessibility, or lack thereof. Bass boat anglers can fish certain sections of the river, but much of this incredible fishery can only be accessed by kayaks or jet boats, keeping the pressure off of the bass. This keeps the bass healthy, and makes them all the more fun to catch when you’re able to get into these skinny water areas where they’re not used to seeing a bait.
The smallmouth in the Susquehanna are some of the most aggressive bass I’ve ever fished for. They will chase your bait through roaring currents, even rapids, until they track it down and eat it. I can only imagine what a real baitfish must feel like in those final moments.
How to Catch Smallmouth in the Susquehanna River
To target these aggressive smallmouth in super shallow water, my favorite technique to throw is a lightwire spinnerbait with willow blades. The thump of the willow blades against the current drives these smallmouth nuts, and by targeting eddies created by massive rock shelves in the river, you can have one of the most fun days of your life catching smallmouth.
In deeper, slower water, I’ve always found success with a lightweight tube while working current breaks off of the bank or bigger boulders that create eddies in the middle of the river. The name of the game for catching smallmouth in the Susquehanna River is to find and fish current breaks.
Honorable Mentions
As you can imagine, there are many more than just seven phenomenal smallmouth fisheries in the U.S. Just because your favorite didn’t make the list doesn’t mean it’s not a great place to catch some bass. Honestly, you should thank me for keeping it under wraps. But, just in case you’ve crossed off the seven locations above and want to try somewhere new and different, here are some fantastic smallmouth fisheries worth visiting.
Lake Washington
Per the adamant request from OL’s shooting editor, John B. Snow, Lake Washington makes the list because it gives West Coast anglers a close-to-home location to target trophy smallmouth. With over 30 square miles of fishable water, anglers have plenty of options for targeting the lake’s many smallmouth. From fly fishing techniques to the typical drop shot and Ned rig, there’s plenty of bass to go around.
Candlewood Lake
Candlewood is Connecticut’s crown jewel when it comes to bass fishing. Covering less than 10 square miles, this manmade lake in the Western part of the state produces some impressive smallmouth bass. Anglers typically like to target the bank to pursue smallmouth, focusing on visible cover like rock piles, boulders, and laydowns, but the key to bigger bites is finding schools out deep and targeting them with techniques like hover-strolling using live sonar.
Oneida Lake
This is one of the lakes in the honorable mentions section that almost made its way into the top seven. Oneida Lake is known for its incredible smallmouth fishing, but in recent years, it has been experiencing a drop in numbers and size. While plenty of anglers can speculate as to why that might be the case, the real reason remains unknown. Regardless, Oneida remains a world-class smallmouth fishery even at its current low spot. Anglers targeting the smallmouth in Oneida typically focus on hard bottoms that are found amongst the sand and aquatic vegetation. Once located, the standard tube, drop shot, or Ned rig will get you plenty of bites.
Rainy Lake
This is yet another example of a world-class smallmouth fishery that could have cracked into the top seven bodies of water listed above. Rainy Lake is a big body of water found on the Minnesota border, splitting over 350 square miles of water with Canada. The large waterbody boasts some incredible smallmouth, in both numbers and size, but lacks the publicity that other fisheries get. That very well could make it the hidden gem of this list. If you want to experience the fishing for yourself, anglers love targeting smallmouth with jerkbaits, crankbaits, and swimbaits, along with the typical bottom bouncers in warmer weather.
Pickwick Lake
For the bass anglers down South, don’t think I’ve forgotten about you. While you might want to pack up the rig and drive north to experience the beauty of smallmouth country, don’t forget that you have some incredible smallmouth fishing in your own backyard. Covering over 67 square miles, Pickwick Lake is a part of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) chain of lakes and offers some of the best largemouth fishing in the country. But, what is often overlooked is the incredible smallmouth fishing Pickwick has to offer. As one of the southernmost bodies of water to contain smallmouth bass, Pickwick Lake is home to some giant smallmouth that are worth pursuing with chatterbaits, crankbaits, and even topwater during the early summer months.
Dale Hollow Reservoir
Rounding out our honorable mentions is Dale Hollow Reservoir. Situated on the Tennessee and Kentucky border, this 43 square mile body of water is host to plenty of smallmouth. But the real reason it has to make the list is the fact that it holds the claim for producing the world-record smallmouth. The 11-pound, 15-ounce bass caught in 1955 remains the largest ever recorded, earning Dale Hollow its fame. While you may not catch the world record, Dale Hollow still offers anglers the opportunity to catch smallmouth in deep water using new techniques like strolling and Damiki rigging. If you’re in the area, it’s certainly worth the trip.
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