A day on this water is usually a short day. Quabbin Reservoir is the exception at 23,895 acres, big enough that the far end of it is a trip of its own, and Lake Candlewood at 5,090 acres and Wachusett Reservoir at 3,954 acres are the only other two with that kind of room. Below them the character changes fast. Otis Reservoir is 988 acres. Bantam Lake is 939. Most of the launching that happens around this pack puts you on something smaller than either of those, on a pond where the useful knowledge is which end of it is worth running to in August.
The pack carries 3,456 charted water bodies. Of those, 2,520 are named, which is ninth among the 48 state lake packs and about 73 percent of everything in this one. Of the named ones, 131 run over a square kilometer and the other 2,389 sit under that mark. Depth on all of it is built from state elevation surveys, and the water bodies themselves come from the National Hydrography Dataset.
The number that stands out in this pack is not the total. At 3,456 water bodies the pack sits twenty-fourth of the 48 state lake packs, which is the middle of the field. The named count is ninth. 2,520 of those 3,456 carry a name, and a named water body is one you can find by typing it in rather than by hunting for the right blue shape at the ramp with the truck still running.
The 131 named lakes over a square kilometer rank seventeenth. A square kilometer is about 247 acres, which is a pond you can still see across, so that count reaches a long way past the twenty largest listed below. It is the practical middle of this pack: water with real coves in it and more than one place to put the boat.
| Lake | Charted surface area |
|---|---|
| Quabbin Reservoir | 97 km² (23,895 acres) |
| Lake Candlewood | 21 km² (5,090 acres) |
| Wachusett Reservoir | 16 km² (3,954 acres) |
| Massabesic Lake | 10 km² (2,545 acres) |
| Scituate Reservoir | 9 km² (2,323 acres) |
| Barkhamsted Reservoir | 9 km² (2,224 acres) |
| Assawompset Pond | 8 km² (2,026 acres) |
| Harriman Reservoir | 8 km² (1,927 acres) |
| Long Pond | 7 km² (1,779 acres) |
| Watuppa Pond | 7 km² (1,754 acres) |
| Tomhannock Reservoir | 7 km² (1,705 acres) |
| Lake Lillinonah | 6 km² (1,532 acres) |
The twelve largest named lakes the Massachusetts pack carries, by charted surface area, measured from the chart polygon itself. The pack carries 3,456 charted water bodies in all, 2,520 of them named, and 131 named lakes larger than one square kilometer.
Quabbin Reservoir is not in the same class as anything else here. At 96.7 square kilometers it is close to five times the size of Lake Candlewood, which is second at 20.6, and it is larger than the nine lakes below it put together. Those nine come to 95.6 square kilometers between them. If the water you know is the pond kind, the thing to understand about Quabbin before you launch is that a wind out of the northwest has miles to work with.
These are the eight largest the pack carries, measured from the chart polygon itself:
Watuppa Pond and South Watuppa Pond are carried as two separate water bodies, 1,754 acres and 1,458 acres, so 3,212 acres of water between the pair. Long Pond at 1,779 acres is slightly bigger than either basin on its own. Lake Chaubunagungamaug is 1,260 acres, which is less run than the name suggests. At the bottom end of the twenty, Sudbury Reservoir is 914 acres and Edgartown Great Pond is 865, and both of those still clear the square kilometer line that 131 lakes in this pack clear.
There is no NOAA nautical chart for a reservoir. The official charts cover the coast, the intracoastal and navigable rivers, and they stop well before a hillside impoundment with one state ramp on it. Inland depth in Helm is built from state elevation surveys instead, and the outlines of the water come from the National Hydrography Dataset. That pairing is the whole reason a reservoir in this pack has contours, shading and a depth reading on it rather than a flat blue fill.
A reservoir also sits at whatever level it is being held at, and several of the largest here are reservoirs. The contour itself is the shape of the basin, so it does not move when the level does. What moves is where the waterline crosses it. Reading a contour on a drawn down reservoir means keeping in mind that the bottom is closer to you than it was in the spring, by roughly however far the surface has dropped. The old creek channel is still the same line it was in June, and the flats on either side of it are the part that goes thin first.
Draft shading, the shallowest point on a measured line and the router all read these same inland numbers. How that machinery works is a subject of its own and lives on the depth and routing pages.
That is where most of the boating in this pack happens. A hundred and twenty acre pond with a gravel lot and one ramp will never appear on a nautical chart, and it is the water somebody hitches up for at five in the morning. Having it charted, named and carrying a depth number is the difference between planning a morning and finding out.
The naming matters more inland than it does on salt water. Offshore you work from a chart number and a buoy. On a Tuesday evening you are looking for Otis Reservoir or Assawompset Pond by name, and 2,520 of the 3,456 water bodies in this pack answer to one.
Once the pack is downloaded, the chart, the depth shading, the measure tool and the router all work with no cell signal. That is worth knowing before the tow, because a good number of these ramps sit down in a hole where the phone gives up in the parking lot.
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.
96.7 square kilometers, or 23,895 acres, measured from the chart polygon itself. It is the largest water body the Massachusetts lake pack carries by a wide margin. The next one down, Lake Candlewood, is 5,090 acres, and Quabbin is larger than the nine lakes below it added together.
Yes. Bantam Lake is 939 acres and Edgartown Great Pond is 865, and both are charted water in this pack with contours and a depth reading built from state elevation surveys. So are the 2,389 named waters in the pack that are smaller than a square kilometer, which is roughly 247 acres.
Yes, as long as you read it for what it is. The contours describe the shape of the basin from the elevation survey, so they hold whatever the surface is doing. When the level drops, the shoreline moves in and everything under you is shallower by about that much. The channel through the middle stays the channel, and with your draft entered it is the shoulders on either side that shade.
Helm Boating