These fish are common throughout the Finger Lakes region and typically run from about 12” to 17”, with occasional bigger fish mixed in. Pound for pound, they are one of the best fighting fish in freshwater.  New York State now allows year around “Catch and Release” fishing for smallmouth bass on ALL the Finger Lakes! This is a golden opportunity to catch smallmouths averaging 15″ to 18″ in shallow water! Bigger fish are available too, especially on Owasco, Otisco and Keuka Lakes.

My first choice for smallmouth bass in the Eastern Finger Lakes is Skaneateles Lake.   Bass here behave like smallmouth bass should!  They aren’t suspended over deep water chasing alewives. You can do just fine here without $20,000 of “live-scope” sonar on your boat.  They are often found near shore, and they do a lot of feeding on bottom on crayfish.   Even tough days are usually productive on Skaneateles.

Keuka Lake is usually a  good smallmouth fishery with big fish as well as decent numbers, but reports from 2025 showed tough bass fishing.  Fish were harder to come by and DEC felt that they were in deeper water than usual due to the very hot June that we experienced.

Owasco Lake is a fair smallmouth fishery, known more for size than numbers.  We caught some nice fish here in 2025 although I did not target them much here.

Otisco Lake also produces some big alewife-fed smallmouths.

As of this writing the smallmouth population is down on Cayuga Lake.  Don’t believe the hype touting the terrific smallmouth bass fishing from the national media (e.g., B.A.S.S.) After a widespread smallmouth die-off around 2007 and the invasion of round gobies in 2012, the smallmouth fishing here still isn’t very good by most metrics.  They are caught in the spawn phase (when their nests are completely vulnerable to goby-predation) and more recently during the summer by anglers using “Live-Scope” sonar. Apart from that, they aren’t caught often.

You aren’t buying a few dozen crayfish and drifting the weed edges and drop-offs catching bass here like you might back from the 1960s through the early-2000s.  The fish here are large but uncommon.  When guys have to spend hour upon hour “scanning” the major structural elements on this lake in hopes of locating a few bass or a small group on perhaps 20% of the elements they scan, the fishing leaves a lot to be desired.

I’ve been reading over my old fishing logs and was surprised at how well we used to do for smallmouth bass on Cayuga Lake – not only on the southern half of the lake, but throughout the entire lake.  Fishing for them was very good in the early-2000s!  One good bass angler told me that the smallmouth fishing on Cayuga Lake has basically “moved to the north,” meaning that in the pre-invasive, pre-mid 2000s die-off era, the best smallmouth fishing was often seen as being roughly from Dean’s Cove/Long Point, south to the south end of the lake, whereas now, the better smallmouth fishing is north of these areas.

Seneca Lake is worth keeping an eye on if you like smallmouth bass.  I spent some time out here in 2025 fishing bass and even included some smallmouth fishing on a few guided trips. We caught some very nice bass here!  The fishing wasn’t great, but they were fairly well-distributed and ran large.  Drop-shotting was very effective for us, but we also had fish on blade-baits.  Soft-jerkbaits and tube-jigs should also produce well here.  The gobies have invaded the lake and the fish are chomping on them, but we still haven’t seen the effects of goby-predation on the bass eggs and fry quite yet.  It’s coming unfortunately, but for now, the bass numbers and size are good!  Take advantage of it while you can.

I did a lot of fishing for smallmouths in Lake Ontario during the 1990s and up until around 10 years ago.   The fishing was phenomenal for 12″ to 15″ bass.   Action slowed down a lot in the late 2000s with the appearance of gobies.   Slowly but surely things are reaching a balance and fishing has improved considerably since then.    I’ve had some good to excellent smallmouth fishing over the past couple seasons around Oswego – in the river, harbor and the lake.  2025 was fair for us on Lake Ontario out of Fairhaven/Oswego.  Not good but not awful.