Almost all of the big water in this pack is impounded. Lake of the Ozarks, Table Rock Lake, Bull Shoals Lake, Stockton Lake and Harry S Truman Reservoir are flooded river valleys with a dam at one end, and that shapes how you run them. The old creek channel is still the deep line. The coves shoal toward the back. The bank you idle past was a hillside before the gates closed and it keeps roughly the slope it had, which is why a bluff bank drops off fast and a timbered flat does not. Anybody who has run one of these lakes for a season knows all of that by feel. The chart is for the arm you have not been up yet, and for the morning the water is four feet lower than the last time you were there.
The pack carries 3,873 charted water bodies. Of those, 1,353 carry a name, 72 of the named ones are larger than one square kilometer, and seven are larger than 100 square kilometers. Lake of the Ozarks is the largest the pack carries, at 184.5 square kilometers, or 45,591 acres. The water bodies themselves come from the National Hydrography Dataset and the depth under them is built from state elevation surveys. That combination is the difference between a lake you can look at on a screen and a lake you can plan a route across against the draft of your own boat.
Most of the 3,873 are small. 2,520 of them carry no name at all, which is what you get when every farm pond and every flood control impoundment is counted alongside the big water. They are still charted shapes with depth under them, and the small ones are the reason the shoreline on the screen matches the shoreline in front of the bow when you come around a point.
The top of the list is where this pack is unusual. Seven pieces of water in it clear 100 square kilometers, and the first two are close enough to argue about at a ramp. Lake of the Ozarks measures 184.5 square kilometers against Bull Shoals Lake at 181.2, a gap of 3.3 square kilometers, which works out to about 816 acres. In practical terms they are the same size of afternoon.
Both figures, the metric one and the acreage, come off the chart polygon itself rather than from a fishing guide, so the acre numbers here and the numbers you see on the water are measuring the same outline.
| Lake | Charted surface area |
|---|---|
| Lake of the Ozarks | 184 km² (45,591 acres) |
| Bull Shoals Lake | 181 km² (44,775 acres) |
| Grand Lake O' The Cherokees | 157 km² (38,721 acres) |
| Table Rock Lake | 136 km² (33,656 acres) |
| Beaver Lake | 113 km² (27,898 acres) |
| Harry S Truman Reservoir | 103 km² (25,427 acres) |
| Stockton Lake | 101 km² (24,859 acres) |
| Norfork Lake | 76 km² (18,706 acres) |
| Mark Twain Lake | 62 km² (15,197 acres) |
| Pomme de Terre Lake | 31 km² (7,636 acres) |
| Lake Wappapello | 31 km² (7,586 acres) |
| Clinton Lake | 30 km² (7,314 acres) |
The twelve largest named lakes the Missouri pack carries, by charted surface area, measured from the chart polygon itself. The pack carries 3,873 charted water bodies in all, 1,353 of them named, and 72 named lakes larger than one square kilometer.
There is no NOAA chart for a reservoir. The federal charts cover the coast, the intracoastal and the navigable rivers, and a lake held behind a flood control dam is none of those. Inland depth in Helm is built another way. The shape and the name of each water body come from the National Hydrography Dataset, and the depth under the surface is built from state elevation surveys. Without that second half a lake is a blue polygon with a label on it. With it the lake has contours, a depth reading on the water and something for the router to work against once your draft is entered.
There is a second thing worth saying about reading a contour on a reservoir. A lake like this one sits at whatever level the operator is holding it at that week. The bottom does not move. The surface does, and on a flood control lake it can travel several feet between the spring rise and the end of August. So a contour is a statement about the shape of the bottom, and the day's pool level is what tells you where the surface is sitting above that shape.
Read the two together and the picture is straightforward. Where it shows up first is the back of a cove and the shoulder beside a creek channel, because those are the flattest ground on the lake and a foot off the top takes a long way off the edge. The channel itself, being the old creek bed, is the last thing to go thin.
Below the two at the top, Grand Lake O' The Cherokees runs 156.7 square kilometers, or 38,721 acres, and Table Rock Lake 136.2, or 33,656 acres. Then Beaver Lake at 112.9 square kilometers, Harry S Truman Reservoir at 102.9 and Stockton Lake at 100.6, which is 24,859 acres. Surface area is worth knowing before you launch a small boat, because it is a rough measure of how much room the wind has to build a chop across. On 184.5 square kilometers the far bank is a long way off on a July afternoon.
The middle of the list is where most people actually spend their weekends. Norfork Lake carries 75.7 square kilometers, or 18,706 acres, and Mark Twain Lake 61.5, or 15,197 acres, which makes Mark Twain almost exactly twice the size of Pomme de Terre Lake at 30.9 square kilometers. Stockton is better than three times Pomme de Terre. Pomme de Terre and Lake Wappapello are near twins, 7,636 acres against 7,586, a difference of fifty acres that you would never notice from the water.
Further down, Clinton Lake is 29.6 square kilometers, Hillsdale Lake 17.5, Thomas Hill Reservoir 16.2 and Long Branch Lake 11.1. Lake Taneycomo is 8.6 square kilometers, about 2,125 acres, which is close to a sixteenth of Table Rock. Small water is not simple water. A lake that narrow puts you close to a bank the whole run, and the contours are doing more work per acre than they do out in the middle of a big reservoir.
The chart packs are cut to a box rather than to a state line. A lake sitting near a border therefore appears in two packs, and the useful consequence is that you do not have to work out which side of a line your ramp is on before you download anything. Pick the pack that covers the water you run and take what comes with it. If your season crosses over, there are packs for Iowa, Illinois, Kentucky and Tennessee as well.
Download it at home on wifi. A ramp two ridges back from the nearest tower is not where you want to discover how many bars you have. Once the pack is on the device the charts, the depth shading, the routing and the measure tool all keep working with no service, which is the normal condition on most of this water.
The measure tool is the one that earns its keep on a lake you have not run. Draw a line from the ramp across to the far bank, or up the middle of an arm, and you get the distance, the bearing and a depth profile along it with the shallowest point marked rather than averaged into the rest.
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 number on the water. The outline comes from the National Hydrography Dataset and the depth under it from state elevation surveys, so the 184.5 square kilometers the pack carries for Lake of the Ozarks, 45,591 acres of it, is charted water. Enter the draft of your boat once and the water it cannot cross shades, including the flats at the back of the coves.
Yes, with the pool level in mind. The contours describe the shape of the bottom and that does not change when the lake is drawn down, so the creek channel is still the channel. What changes is where the surface sits above that shape. Check the day's level, then read the contours with that offset, and expect the difference to show up first along the shoulders and in the backs of the coves on all 136.2 square kilometers of it.
Both are in this pack: Bull Shoals Lake at 181.2 square kilometers, 44,775 acres, and Norfork Lake at 75.7 square kilometers, 18,706 acres. Because the packs are cut to a box rather than to a state line, water close to a border also turns up in the neighboring pack, so either one will likely cover the pair. Download it before you leave the house and both lakes work with no signal.
Helm Boating