Top 15 Bass Fishing Lakes: #1-5

Over the last several weeks, we have been rolling out our Top 15 Bass Fishing Lakes. We’ve finally come to our top five. Keep reading to see what we believe to be the best lakes in North America.

Top 15 Bass Fishing Lakes: #11-15

Top 15 Bass Fishing Lakes: #6-10

5. Lake St. Clair – Michigan, Ontario

St. Clair is another lake that produces a ton of quality smallmouth. While there are a handful of giant smallies, the most impressive thing about St. Clair is the sheer population of quality fish. Throw a tube and a drop shot for one of the most fun days of fishing you’ll ever have. Just about anyone can go out there and catch a limit of fish, but if you can catch a 22-pound limit, chances are you will win most tournaments here. 

4. Kentucky Lake – Kentucky, Tennessee

Kentucky Lake is one of the most phenomenal ledge fishing lakes in the world. It recently took over 97 pounds to win BASSfest, and anglers fishing the final day needed more than a 20-pound average to make the day three cut. In the spring, anglers will find some fish out deep, but a lot of them will be looking to spawn in the buckbrush as temperatures start to warm. After the spawn, start using your Garmin combo units, such as the GPSMAP 7610xsv paired with a Panoptix transducer, to help locate those offshore fish. In the summer, you can also get on a grass pattern as well, and now you are finding more fish shallow than ever before. Still, ledges are the way to go.

You can catch both largemouth and smallmouth at Kentucky Lake, but in a tournament, most anglers will come to the scales with a bag of largemouth. 

3. Lake Fork – Texas

Lake Fork is a big bass hunter’s dream. Over 250 fish have been entered into the Toyota ShareLunker program from Fork, including 33 of the top 50 biggest largemouth. That’s more than 10 times the amount of ShareLunkers from any other lake in Texas. In 2014 at the Toyota Texas Bass Classic, 538 Lake Fork largemouth were weighed in for an average of 5.02 pounds each. It took a staggering 110 pounds to win that three-day event. If that doesn’t convince you to put Fork on your bucket list, we don’t know what will!

2. Lake Michigan – Michigan, Wisconsin

Areas of Lake Michigan will change your life as far as smallmouth fishing goes. If you love finesse fishing and throwing a tube, Lake Michigan is the place for you. Limits averaging more than 20 pounds of smallmouth are common. Sturgeon Bay has notably the best smallie fishing in the world. Five and six pounders are commonly caught and they put up a fight that will challenge even the best anglers. Grand Traverse Bay holds some of the biggest fish in Lake Michigan. No one knows why, but if you want to catch a personal best smallmouth, head there.

1. Lake Guntersville – Alabama

Lake Guntersville tops our list of the best bass fishing lakes in North America. Use your Garmin combo units with MaxDef mapping to help find ledges, humps and flats. With the amount of fishing pressure that is put on Guntersville ever year, it’s amazing how the lake has sustained itself at the top. At the Bassmaster Elite Series event on Lake Guntersville this year, Garmin pro Byron Velvick finished second with more than 88 pounds over four days. If you didn’t average more than 17 pounds each day, you didn’t even make the cut.

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