Fair Haven Beach State Park is a 1,141 acre state park on the southeastern shore of Lake Ontario, run by the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation from an office at 14985 State Park Road in the Town of Sterling, Cayuga County. The park holds 1,500 feet of sand beach, of which 600 feet is a guarded swim area. The swimming is genuine open lake swimming, not a pond or a river pool, so the water is as warm or as cold as Lake Ontario happens to be and an onshore wind can put real surf on the sand.

The waterfront is split into two named beaches, West Beach and East Beach, divided by the short bulkheaded channel that drains inland Sterling Pond north into the lake. A footbridge crosses the channel and links the two. West Beach sits immediately east of the Federal Pier at the mouth of Little Sodus Bay. The bathing sand is wide and shallow-graded with cobble and scattered rounded stone along the back of the beach, and a few hundred yards northeast of East Beach the shoreline gives up sand entirely and turns to loose cobble below a low wooded bank. Do not confuse the lake beach with Sterling Pond behind it, which is the boating water, not the swimming water.

The 2026 beach season runs May 23 through September 7, with peak hours of 11am to 7pm Monday through Friday and 10am to 8pm on weekends and holidays between June 20 and August 2. Swimming is allowed only inside the guarded area while lifeguards are on duty and the beach is open, and pets are barred from guarded beaches. Outside those dates and hours there is no staffed swim area.

Entry is $9 per vehicle, or $35 for a bus, collected daily April 1 through October 31. Camping runs May 15 to October 12 across 46 electric and 138 non-electric sites, at $20 to $31 a night plus a $5 out-of-state surcharge. Cabins run $322 to $644 a week and cottages $500 to $800 a week, seasonally. Canoes, kayaks and paddleboards rent for $10 an hour, $40 a day or $160 a week from 9am to 5pm, and the park restricts those rentals to Sterling Pond rather than the open lake.

Water quality here is actually watched. Lake Ontario Waterkeeper samples the beaches and reports into Swim Guide, which carries separate listings for West Beach, East Beach and Channel Beach. West Beach was sampled daily from May 18 to September 16 in 2026 and has passed between 60 and 95 percent of the time. New York posts a freshwater beach when a single sample exceeds 235 E. coli per 100 ml or when the geometric mean across 30 days exceeds 126. Check the current posting before you get in, because the pass rate here is not spotless.

Northeast of the beaches the land rises into the towering shoreline bluffs the park is known for, pale cut faces under hardwoods, reached by the 8/10 mile Bluff Nature Trail. Sterling Creek and Sterling Marsh drain the hilly woodland behind. The camping area has an odd history: the Civilian Conservation Corps built the original camp in the early 1930s, and German prisoners of war worked here later, when the site served as the Prison Camp at Fair Haven. The park drew 295,527 visitors in 2014.