On the Water, the Border Is Very Real: How Bass Fishing Became the Unlikely Flashpoint in U.S.-Canada Tensions
There is a stretch of water in upstate New York where the United States and Canada are separated by nothing more than a channel of current. On calm mornings, you can see the Ontario shoreline clearly from a bass boat sitting in American water. For generations, anglers on both sides regarded that line as little more than a formality — something that existed on maps but not in practice. Then the politics changed, the rules got stricter, and what was once a neighborly tradition of shared water became something considerably more complicated.
The friction playing out on the St. Lawrence River and the waters surrounding it is not simply about fish. It is about jurisdiction, identity, and the quiet but deeply held conviction — on both sides of the border — that the best bass fishing on the continent belongs to whoever can catch the most of it. In a moment when U.S.-Canada relations have grown thornier at every level, from tariffs to trade rhetoric, the tournament bass fishing scene has become one of the most vivid and unexpected arenas where that tension is being felt and measured in pounds and ounces.
The St. Lawrence River: A World-Class Fishery Sitting Astride an International Line
To understand why this matters, you have to understand what the St. Lawrence River is to serious bass anglers. Once again, the St. Lawrence River proved why it is one of the best, if not the best, smallmouth fisheries in the country. That assessment, offered in the wake of recent tournament results, understates the case for anyone who has watched the weights come to the scale. Well over 100 twenty-pound sacks were brought to the scales during one recent tournament alone, including five that eclipsed the 26-pound mark. Those are not numbers you see at ordinary fisheries. The St. Lawrence is a legitimate world-class smallmouth factory, and it draws professional anglers from across North America who understand that if you want to win big, you have to fish here.
The catch, quite literally, is that the best parts of this fishery do not respect the international boundary. The river straddles the border for much of its productive stretch, and historically, competitive anglers launched from New York towns like Waddington, Clayton, and Massena and simply fished wherever the fish were biting — American water, Canadian water, it was all part of the same river system. That arrangement worked smoothly for decades, right up until it didn't.
What the River Produces — and What It Means for Tournament Fishing
The pressure amplifies for those needing great outings at the season-finale events on the St. Lawrence, where season-long races, Classic berths, and requalifying spots are all at stake on a fishery that has produced Century Club belts in the past three Elite visits. A Century Club belt — earned by bringing more than 100 pounds of bass to the scale over a multi-day event — is one of the rarest and most celebrated achievements in professional bass fishing. The St. Lawrence gives out more of them than almost anywhere else.
In the final elite event of the 2026 season, 98 Elite anglers took off from Clayton, N.Y., with many venturing out into Lake Ontario where giant smallmouth await. After two days, the anglers with the top 50 weights advance to Semifinal Saturday, when the field is cut to 10 for Championship Sunday — with the winner earning $100,000, a coveted blue trophy, and a berth into the following year's Bassmaster Classic. Nowhere else in competitive bass fishing does the geography so directly force anglers to navigate international waters as part of a standard competitive day.
The Border Incident That Changed Everything
The shift from informal cooperation to hard-line enforcement did not happen gradually. It happened the way most crises do — suddenly, to someone who never saw it coming. In the wake of a recent incident in which a Baldwinsville, NY man's boat was seized for drifting into Canadian waters, the New York Bass Chapter Federation was forced to make Canadian waters off limits to anglers, and other tournaments remained uncertain about their future.
The seizure sent shockwaves through the competitive fishing community across the northeastern United States. The incident came as a shock to the boating community in Jefferson County, as many fishermen had operated for years with the understanding that fishing in Canadian waters without checking in on land was permitted, as long as the boat was not anchored. That understanding, it turned out, had no formal legal backing. It was an informal arrangement — the kind that works perfectly until politics makes it inconvenient.
Another tournament to be held in Clayton was forced to consider how to adjust its format after the recent events, while the FLW EverStart Series began discussing ways to keep Canadian waters open ahead of their own tournament. The ripple effect was immediate and costly. Tournament organizations that had planned their schedules, sold their registrations, and set their prize pools around the full run of the river suddenly found themselves scrambling to redraw competitive boundaries based on international law rather than fish habitat.
Senator Schumer Steps In
Senator Charles E. Schumer announced he was calling on both the Canadian Border Services Agency and U.S. Customs and Border Protection to create a plan to prescreen fishing tournament participants that would allow them to fish freely on both sides of the border. The fact that a sitting U.S. senator felt compelled to intervene in what is, at its surface, a dispute about bass fishing underscores just how significant the economic stakes are. Town officials in St. Lawrence County were pleased to see multiple fishing tournaments utilizing local boat launches, with tourism officials noting that the numerous fishing tournaments across the county put the region "on the map in all different aspects."
Fishing tournaments are not a minor contributor to the regional economy in upstate New York. They bring hundreds of anglers, their families, their boats, and their equipment budgets to communities that have limited other options for driving tourism dollars. When those tournaments get scaled back — or cancelled outright — because of border enforcement ambiguities, the economic damage is real and it falls on towns that can ill afford it.
Canadians on the Water: Not Just Bystanders Anymore
What makes this border tension particularly rich is that Canadians are no longer simply the other side of the line. They are competitors on it — and increasingly dominant ones. Cory Johnston of Peterborough, Ontario, has the benefit of fishing on his home waters. In nine Bassmaster tournaments on the St. Lawrence fishery, he has been runner-up twice and won three times, including the 2021 Open at 1000 Islands and the 2025 St. Lawrence Open.
Johnston's dominance on this fishery is not a fluke. In the 2024 St. Lawrence Elite, Cory Johnston made a long run from Waddington and battled a rough Lake Ontario. Despite a Bassmaster LIVE camera capturing him getting seasick, he rallied past leader Robert Gee to win with 102-0, with Gee also earning a Century Club belt at 100-7. That image — a Canadian angler, visibly ill on the water, refusing to quit and then winning — became something of a symbol for the broader story of Canadian competitive bass fishing. They are not going away, and they are not conceding anything.
In that same event, Chris Johnston rallied on Day 3 with a bag of 29-5 — tying the best single-day limit in the fishery's history — to earn the first Angler of the Year title for Canada. The Johnston brothers, fishing out of Ontario, accomplished in a single tournament what no Canadian had ever done before in the sport's most prestigious circuit. That kind of breakthrough changes the conversation permanently.
The Kayak Circuit and the Rise of French-Canadian Talent
The Canadian surge in competitive bass fishing is not limited to the pro boat circuit. In the kayak fishing world, the trend is equally pronounced. The combined result of the KBF Smallmouth Series was excellent competition and qualification action as anglers from across the United States held their own against their northern neighbors, splitting the series at one victory apiece for Canada and the U.S.A.
The first frame of the 2023 KBF Smallmouth Series attracted a whopping 175 anglers, followed by a Fall Frame that added another fifty-plus competitors — bringing the total to over 225 competitors from Canada and the United States competing for smallmouth and qualifying spots. The numbers tell a story about how seriously Canadians have taken to competitive kayak bass fishing, and how the sport is genuinely binational in a way that the political rhetoric about borders tends to obscure.
French-Canadian angler David Faille won the Summer frame of the Smallmouth series after posting a total limit of 106.75 inches, with an average of more than 21.25 inches per fish — marking the first time a Canadian KBF angler had won an international KBF event. Faille's victory was not an anomaly. His countryman Jonathan Daigle took second place in the same event with 105.5 inches, meaning a French-Canadian angler went one-two in the most significant international kayak bass event to date. That performance forced American anglers and organizers alike to take stock of what was happening north of the border.
The Bigger Picture: A Sport Caught Between Nationalism and Shared Water
Bass fishing in North America has always been a sport built around access — the right to fish public water, the assumption that a guy in a boat is just a guy in a boat. The regulations, the species protections, the licensing requirements — all of it has been designed around the idea that fishermen are ultimately conservationists operating in good faith. The border enforcement crackdowns on the St. Lawrence cut against that grain in a fundamental way. They treated a tournament angler drifting across an invisible line in a river as a potential customs violation.
The parallel to other U.S.-Canada fishing disputes is instructive. The history of North American fishing rights is littered with confrontations that started over access and ended up consuming years of diplomatic energy. The Pacific Salmon War was a period of heightened tensions between Canada and the United States over the Pacific salmon catch that began in 1992, after the Pacific Salmon Treaty ratified in 1985 expired, and lasted until a new agreement was signed in 1999. Seven years of conflict over fish — and that was between federal governments with full diplomatic machinery at their disposal. Tournament bass anglers, working through senator's offices and fishing organizations, are navigating a version of the same problem with far fewer tools.
The lobster fisheries of the Gulf of Maine tell an even starker version of the story. The disputed 277 square miles of sea known as the Gray Zone were traditionally fished by U.S. lobstermen, but as the Gulf of Maine warmed faster than nearly any other body of water on the planet, the Gray Zone's previously modest lobster population surged — and as a result, Canadians began asserting their sovereignty in the area. Resource competition follows the resource. When the fish are valuable enough, the border becomes very real, very fast.
Technology Changes the Calculus
One dimension of this rivalry that deserves more attention is how technology has transformed competitive bass fishing at every level. The NPFL is a five-biggest-bass-per-day tournament where the entire 126-angler field participates in all three days of competition, with no cut lines for the final day or championship round. The format changes the way anglers strategize — and introduces new tension between technological arms races and the sport's blue-collar roots. No forward-facing sonar is permitted in NPFL tournament or official practice, making it the only professional league banning the technology — a decision that ensures the circuit will be loaded with classic fishing techniques rather than fancy fishing computers.
The technology question overlaps with the border question in an interesting way. Forward-facing sonar has transformed how professional anglers locate and target fish, and when that sonar is pointed at a productive Canadian channel on the St. Lawrence, the question of where you are fishing — legally — becomes genuinely complicated. The precision of modern fish-finding technology means an angler can effectively fish Canadian water from American water in ways that were impossible a decade ago, blurring the already murky jurisdictional lines even further.
The Canadian Pro Circuit: A Legitimate Rival, Not a Curiosity
For American bass fishing fans who have followed the sport for years, the rise of Canadian pros requires a genuine recalibration of expectations. Chris Johnston's Angler of the Year title was the clearest signal yet that the dominance American anglers have enjoyed on the Bassmaster circuit is not guaranteed. One of the tightest three-way Angler of the Year races in Bassmaster history came down to a three-horse contest between the brother of two-time defending AOY Cory Johnston, back-to-back runner-up Trey McKinney, and veteran Drew Cook. The fact that a Johnston — Canadian, fishing home water — was in the mix for another title speaks to how fundamentally the sport's competitive landscape has shifted.
Canadian Evan Kung has been fighting for his Bassmaster Elite Series career on the St. Lawrence, needing to climb points to stay above the safe line — a testament to the grind of the pro circuit regardless of nationality. Kung holds two top-20 finishes on the St. Lawrence out of Waddington against both the Elite and Open fields. The presence of multiple Canadian pros grinding through the same circuit pressures, the same points races, and the same qualification battles as their American counterparts has made the national dimension of the rivalry impossible to ignore.
On the international stage, the competition extends well beyond North American waters. Sanctioned by FIPSed, the Black Bass World Championship is the pinnacle of international bass fishing, bringing together elite anglers from across the globe — with the 2025 event held on Lake Arabie in South Africa marking the 19th edition of the championship. The United States Bass Team entered that event defending its gold medal, having made a dramatic comeback to unseat Italy on the final day of competition. Canada, meanwhile, has been a consistent presence at these global events, competing at the 2024 Pan American Bass Championship on home soil and building the international resume that makes the bilateral rivalry feel like prologue to something larger.
What It Means for the Future of the Sport
The U.S.-Canada bass fishing rivalry is not going to be settled by a senator's phone call or a new customs pre-clearance protocol, though both of those things matter enormously to the anglers actually trying to compete. What is really happening is a broader shift in who owns the sport's identity — and who gets to define what the best bass fishing in North America looks like.
For decades, the answer to that question was automatic: the Americans. Bass fishing as an organized, professional, televised, tournament sport was invented in the American South, scaled up by American money, and broadcast to an American audience. The Bassmaster Classic, the biggest event in the sport, has been held almost exclusively on American water. The culture of competitive bass fishing — the big rigs, the sponsorships, the weigh-in ceremonies — is deeply American in its aesthetic and its ambition.
But the fish do not know any of that. The smallmouth bass that pile into the St. Lawrence River every summer are following currents and temperatures and forage, not flags. And the anglers who have learned those patterns the most thoroughly — who have spent decades on that water, who grew up speaking French or English but always reading the river — are increasingly Canadian. Cory Johnston may have started the final day in fourth place, but the Canadian pro put on a show during Championship Saturday, catching 26-7 to claim his second Opens trophy at the St. Lawrence River. That kind of dominance on what is, geographically and legally, American tournament water forces a reckoning.
The border dispute and the on-water rivalry are two expressions of the same underlying tension: the Americans built the sport, but the Canadians — at least on this stretch of river, at least in this era — are fishing it better. How the sport, the tournament organizations, and the two governments navigate that reality will determine whether the St. Lawrence remains the crown jewel of the competitive bass season or becomes a cautionary tale about what happens when politics and passion for fishing collide without anyone at the wheel.
The Bottom Line for Anyone Holding a Rod
For the American angler — the guy who drives twelve hours to Waddington with a bass boat in tow and a week's worth of vacation burned — the border situation is not an abstraction. It is a real constraint on where he can compete, what tournaments he can enter, and whether the event he signed up for will look anything like what was advertised. The competitive fishing community has been remarkably adaptive in the face of these constraints, redrawing boundaries, restructuring formats, and lobbying for practical solutions. But adaptability has limits, and the uncertainty is wearing.
What the best anglers on both sides of the line understand — and what the politicians and bureaucrats sometimes seem to miss — is that the St. Lawrence River does not care about any of this. There are no signs that this mighty river is slowing down. The smallmouth are still there in numbers that stagger even veteran tournament observers. The water is still cold and clear and full of fish that will break your heart and your tackle on the same cast. The fishing is still extraordinary.
The only question is who gets to fish it — and under what terms. For now, that answer is being written in courtrooms and congressional offices and customs enforcement memos, instead of where it belongs: on the water, at first light, with the best man winning regardless of which flag flies on his shore.
