Why Lake Champlain is one of America's great bass lakes
One lake, two fisheries. A deep, clear smallmouth half up north and a shallow, weedy largemouth half down south, all in a single 120-mile stretch of water.
Lake Champlain is 120 miles long, and for most of that length it behaves like two different lakes that happen to share a name.
The north half is deep and clear, a smallmouth factory. The south end is shallow and weedy, a largemouth stronghold. That one-two punch is why a lake most people know for ferries and Fort Ticonderoga keeps drawing the best bass anglers in the country back every August.
The long lake between two mountain ranges
Champlain sits in a trench between the Adirondacks of New York and the Green Mountains of Vermont, and it runs from Whitehall, New York, north into Quebec. The Lake Champlain Basin Program puts the numbers at 120 miles long, 400 feet at its deepest point, and roughly 64 feet deep on average. Its shoreline runs 587 miles, and its watershed drains more than 8,000 square miles. The deepest water sits between Charlotte, Vermont, and Essex, New York. It is one of the largest freshwater lakes in the United States outside the Great Lakes.
Two fisheries, one lake
The main basin is cold, clear, and rocky, which smallmouth bass love. They are the "brown bass" here, and they cruise open water in a way anglers can spot from a long way off in that clarity. The southern end could not be more different. Around Ticonderoga the water is shallow, murky, and choked with milfoil, and it is the "green bass," the largemouth, that own that part of the lake. Bassmaster even nicknamed the spot "Largemouth Central."
The murk in the south is the surprising part. Visibility near Ticonderoga can run around a foot, against five to eight feet up the lake, which is why the smallmouth that do live down there get overlooked. Anglers who know the lake hunt them anyway. Up north, in the clear water, summer smallmouth often hold in six to thirteen feet, and tournament anglers commonly drop-shot in fifteen to twenty. Different water, different fish, same lake.
The north end has its own personality. A scatter of islands and bays, plus a pocket anglers call the Inland Sea, gives smallmouth a hundred places to set up. Brandon Palaniuk won the 2020 Elite event there by fishing flats with scattered rock and boulders. Farther south the lake opens wide and deep, which suits the roaming smallmouth, and below Crown Point it narrows into a shallower, river-like stretch. None of it looks like the same body of water.
Why anglers keep coming back
Bassmaster ranked Champlain fifth on its 2026 list of the best lakes in the Northeast, and the reason is the variety. On the same four-day tournament an angler can chase smallmouth on a deep rock pile one morning and flip for largemouth in the grass the next. The catch is distance. The run from the Plattsburgh takeoff down to Ticonderoga is about seventy miles, and a rough wind can turn it into a long, wet ride. Anglers choose their lake each morning.
That choice is the quiet joy of the place. Most bass lakes make you commit to one style of fishing. Champlain lets you pick your own adventure, and it rewards either decision with a real chance at a heavy bag.
Why it matters now
The lake is in the news because the 2026 SPRO Bassmaster Elite stopped there in mid-August, and because the tournament was run without forward-facing sonar after a coin flip. But the lake does not need the headline. Its smallmouth and largemouth have been doing this dance for decades, and they will be there long after this year's standings are forgotten. The best fisheries are not the ones with a single big trick. They are the ones that let a person change their mind on a Tuesday and still catch fish.
Sources
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