Most of the big water in this pack was a river valley before a dam closed across it. Eufaula Lake and Lake Texoma are wide enough that an afternoon wind gets a long fetch to work with, and the chop that comes up on either one is short and close together rather than rolling. Grand Lake O' The Cherokees runs back into the hills in narrow arms where the fetch never builds at all. Robert S Kerr Reservoir and Webbers Falls Reservoir sit in a line down the same river and read like wide river more than like lake, which is what they are. Under all of them the old channel is still down there, and it is still the deep line across the flats.
The Oklahoma lake pack carries 4,411 charted water bodies. Of those, 1,265 have names, and 106 of the named ones cover more than a square kilometer. The packs are cut to a box rather than to a state line, so water sitting near a border ends up in more than one pack. That is why Lake Texoma and Lake Kemp are both in this one.
Counted against the other state packs, 4,411 water bodies puts this one seventeenth of forty eight. The 1,265 named ones rank twenty sixth. The figure that decides most weekends is the third one: 106 named lakes larger than a square kilometer, which ranks twenty third, and a square kilometer is about where a lake becomes worth hitching the trailer for.
The distance between 4,411 and 1,265 is stock ponds and unnamed pools in a river bend. They are on the chart because the water body layer records water without asking first whether anybody launches on it. Some of them are the pond behind a section road. A few are the top end of a creek arm that only counts as separate water when the lake is low.
| Lake | Charted surface area |
|---|---|
| Eufaula Lake | 244 km² (60,343 acres) |
| Lake Texoma | 240 km² (59,182 acres) |
| Grand Lake O' The Cherokees | 157 km² (38,721 acres) |
| Robert S Kerr Reservoir | 144 km² (35,633 acres) |
| Oologah Lake | 120 km² (29,578 acres) |
| Fort Gibson Lake | 72 km² (17,816 acres) |
| Kaw Lake | 65 km² (16,136 acres) |
| Lake Kemp | 61 km² (14,999 acres) |
| Broken Bow Lake | 57 km² (14,110 acres) |
| Sardis Lake | 54 km² (13,344 acres) |
| Keystone Lake | 52 km² (12,948 acres) |
| Tenkiller Ferry Lake | 52 km² (12,849 acres) |
The twelve largest named lakes the Oklahoma pack carries, by charted surface area, measured from the chart polygon itself. The pack carries 4,411 charted water bodies in all, 1,265 of them named, and 106 named lakes larger than one square kilometer.
There is no NOAA chart for a reservoir. The coast has charts because ships trade along it and survey vessels have been working it for a very long time. A lake that filled behind a dam has never had one of those vessels on it.
Inland depth in Helm is built from state elevation surveys instead, and the water bodies themselves come from the National Hydrography Dataset. Those two together are the reason a lake in this pack is water you can plan a route across against your draft rather than a blue shape with a name printed on it. An elevation survey measures ground, and the ground under a reservoir is the part that stays where it is.
What moves is the surface. A reservoir sits at whatever level it is being held at, and that is not the same number in April as it is in the back half of August, so one contour is two different amounts of water depending on the month you are reading it in. Take the contour as the shape of the bottom, find out what the pool is being held at that week, and work from the two together. The old creek channel does not move either. On Oologah Lake or Kaw Lake, when the water comes down, the channel is the line that stays open and the flats on either side of it are where people find the bottom.
Eufaula Lake is the largest named lake the pack carries, 244.2 square kilometers, which the chart polygon puts at 60,343 acres. Lake Texoma is second at 239.5 square kilometers and 59,182 acres. The gap between the two is 1,161 acres, which on water that size is not something you would notice from the seat.
The ten largest named lakes the pack carries, measured from the chart polygon itself:
The step down after Oologah Lake is the one worth noticing. Fort Gibson Lake at 72.1 square kilometers is under a third of the water on Eufaula, and that is roughly where the list stops being open water and starts being a lake you can see across. Further down, Keystone Lake and Tenkiller Ferry Lake come out within half a square kilometer of each other, 12,948 acres against 12,849, which is not how either one feels from the water. Broken Bow Lake at 14,110 acres is bigger than both of them, and Sardis Lake at 13,344 acres sits in between.
Foss Reservoir at 6,351 acres is about a tenth of Eufaula, and it is still the twentieth largest named lake this pack carries. Tom Steed Reservoir is 6,474 acres, Canton Lake 7,067, Great Salt Plains Reservoir 8,253, Waurika Lake 10,057 and Skiatook Lake 10,354. With 106 named lakes over a square kilometer in the pack, the list runs a long way past twenty, and for most people the water they launch on in a given month is somewhere down in that tail rather than at the top of it.
On lakes this size the work that pays off happens before the boat is in the water. Draw a line from the ramp across to the far side of a cove and the profile along it comes back with the shallowest point marked instead of averaged away. Enter the draft of your boat once and the water it cannot cross shades, which on a drawn down reservoir is what puts the shoulder of the old channel on the screen while there is still room to turn. Download the pack at home, since service at the ramps on the smaller reservoirs is thin.
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.
Eufaula, by a margin small enough that it settles very little. Measured from the chart polygons in this pack, Eufaula Lake is 244.2 square kilometers, or 60,343 acres, and Lake Texoma is 239.5 square kilometers, or 59,182 acres. The difference is 1,161 acres between the two largest named lakes the pack carries, and everything after them drops off quickly: Grand Lake O' The Cherokees, third on the list, is 38,721 acres.
Read them as the shape of the basin, because that is what they are. Inland depth here comes from state elevation surveys of the ground rather than from a nautical chart, and the ground does not move when the pool does. Find out what level the lake is being held at that week, then use the contours to locate the old creek channel and the flats beside it. With your draft entered, the shoulders on either side of the channel are the part that shades, and those shoulders are the reason a run you made in the spring is a different run in September.
Both. The packs are cut to a box rather than to a state line, so water near a border sits in more than one of them. The Oklahoma pack carries Lake Texoma at 239.5 square kilometers, 59,182 acres, and it carries Lake Kemp at 60.7 square kilometers as well. Downloading the pack for the side you launch from covers border water like that.
Helm Boating