Boating this water means there is a dam somewhere. Lake Candlewood runs long, with arms that fold back behind wooded points, and a run from one end to the other is a real passage rather than a hop across a pond. Lake Lillinonah and Lake Zoar are the river held back and widened, so they steer like a river: deep down the old channel, thin over the shoulders where a cove used to be a field. Bantam Lake is open enough to build a chop once the wind comes up in the afternoon. Pachaug Pond is the kind of water you idle across looking at the shoreline. Nothing here has a tide to plan around. What moves instead is the level, and it moves because somebody at a dam decided it should.
The Connecticut pack carries 1,392 charted water bodies. Of those, 1,089 have a name on them, and the remaining 303 are charted anyway, which matters because the pond you fish on a Tuesday evening is often one nobody bothered to name. Sixty one of the named lakes are over a square kilometer, which is about 247 acres, and the other 1,028 named ones are smaller than that. The largest water the pack carries is Lake Candlewood at 20.6 square kilometers, 5,090 acres.
Lake Candlewood is larger than the next two on the list put together. Barkhamsted Reservoir at 9.0 square kilometers and New Croton Reservoir at 8.7 come to 17.7 between them, against Candlewood's 20.6. In acres that is 2,224 and 2,150 against 5,090. After those three the sizes drop quickly and then stop dropping.
Otis Reservoir at 988 acres, Bantam Lake at 939, Rye Lake at 914, Cross River Reservoir at 890, Colebrook River Lake at 840, Pachaug Pond at 815, Lake Zoar at 741 and Titicus Reservoir at 717 all sit within 300 acres of one another. That is the real shape of the big water in this pack: one lake you can spend a day crossing, a handful in the thousand to two thousand acre range, and then a long run of lakes you can fish in a morning and cross in a few minutes.
Several of the names on that list are water supply reservoirs. Whether you can put a boat on one, and what kind of boat, is set by the utility that holds it rather than by anything on a chart, so it is worth a phone call before you hitch up the trailer.
| Lake | Charted surface area |
|---|---|
| Lake Candlewood | 21 km² (5,090 acres) |
| Barkhamsted Reservoir | 9 km² (2,224 acres) |
| New Croton Reservoir | 9 km² (2,150 acres) |
| Lake Lillinonah | 6 km² (1,532 acres) |
| Kensico Reservoir | 5 km² (1,334 acres) |
| Lake Chaubunagungamaug | 5 km² (1,260 acres) |
| Muscoot Reservoir | 5 km² (1,161 acres) |
| Lake Gaillard | 4 km² (1,087 acres) |
| Cobble Mountain Reservoir | 4 km² (1,063 acres) |
| Otis Reservoir | 4 km² (988 acres) |
| Bantam Lake | 4 km² (939 acres) |
| Rye Lake | 4 km² (914 acres) |
The twelve largest named lakes the Connecticut pack carries, by charted surface area, measured from the chart polygon itself. The pack carries 1,392 charted water bodies in all, 1,089 of them named, and 61 named lakes larger than one square kilometer.
There is no NOAA chart for a reservoir. NOAA charts the coast, the intracoastal and the navigable rivers, and a lake behind a dam in the hills is nobody's idea of a seaway. So inland depth in Helm is built from state elevation surveys, and the water bodies themselves come from the National Hydrography Dataset.
That pairing is the whole reason a lake here is charted water. The hydrography data gives the shape and the name, down to the 303 water bodies in this pack that carry no name at all. The elevation survey gives what is underneath it. Put the two together and Lake Lillinonah stops being a blue outline with a label floating in the middle of it and becomes water you can read a depth off, draw a line across, and check against the draft of your own boat before you leave the driveway. How the draft shading and the routing behave once the depth is there is its own subject, covered elsewhere on this site.
A contour on a lake describes the shape of the basin, and the basin does not change. The surface does. Every reservoir in this pack is held at a level somebody chose, for power or for water supply or for whatever the season calls for, and the same contour means a different amount of water over your prop in June than it does in October.
Lake Candlewood is the clearest case, because the water in it was pumped up there. Water gets lifted from the river into the lake and run back down through the plant when it is wanted, and the lake comes down over the winter. Lake Lillinonah and Lake Zoar rise and fall with whatever the dams above and below them are passing that day.
Reading a contour on water like that is a habit worth having. When the lake is down, every line is effectively closer to shore than the shape on the screen suggests, and the shoulder of the old creek channel you ran over without thinking in the summer is somewhere to slow down in the fall. Whatever the water covered when the dam went in is still down there. Look at the contour for the shape of the bottom, know roughly where the level is sitting, and keep the lookout you would keep anyway.
The chart packs are cut to a box rather than to a state line, so water near a border ends up in more than one of them. That is the right outcome for anybody who tows across a line to fish. This pack reaches northeast far enough to carry Lake Chaubunagungamaug at 1,260 acres and Otis Reservoir at 988, and west far enough to carry New Croton Reservoir at 2,150 acres, Kensico Reservoir at 1,334, Muscoot Reservoir at 1,161, Rye Lake at 914, Cross River Reservoir at 890 and Titicus Reservoir at 717.
If the water you run sits near an edge, download the packs on both sides of it and stop thinking about it. The neighboring packs here are New York, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and they are listed on the regions page with their own counts.
Inland lake depth comes from state elevation surveys rather than from nautical charts, and a reservoir sits at whatever level it is being held at that week. Treat the shape and the depth as a guide, keep a lookout, and verify locally.
Contours and a depth reading on the water itself. The lake polygon comes from the National Hydrography Dataset and the depth under it comes from state elevation surveys, so all 20.6 square kilometers of Candlewood, 5,090 acres, is charted water you can measure a line across and read against your draft.
Yes, because the contour describes the shape of the basin and the basin is not what moved. On a lake like Candlewood, where water is pumped up from the river and run back down, or on Lake Lillinonah and Lake Zoar where the level follows what the dams pass, read the contour for the shape of the bottom and carry more margin than the shape alone suggests. The flats at the back of a cove are the first thing to go thin.
Both of those are carried by this pack, Lake Chaubunagungamaug at 1,260 acres and Rye Lake at 914, because the packs are cut to a box rather than to a state line. A border lake generally appears in the neighboring pack as well, so if you launch near an edge, download the Connecticut pack and the one next to it, which here means New York, Massachusetts or Rhode Island.
Helm Boating