Boating here mostly means boating on a reservoir, and a reservoir is a river valley with the water held up behind a dam. The old channel is still down there and it is still the deep part. The coves are flooded creeks, and the flats between them are whatever the ground happened to be doing before the water came over it. Kentucky Lake is large enough at 488.1 square kilometers that an afternoon wind has a long fetch to work with. Dale Hollow Lake and Norris Lake are a different sort of day out at about a fifth that size. The thing all of them have in common is that the level is held wherever somebody decided to hold it, so the bank you launched from in May is not the bank in October.
The Tennessee pack carries 2,376 charted water bodies. Of those, 779 carry a name, and 70 of the named ones are larger than a square kilometer. The outlines come from the National Hydrography Dataset. The depth on them is built from state elevation surveys, because a reservoir has no nautical chart and never did have one.
The figure of 2,376 counts every water body the hydrography data records inside the box this pack covers, down to water nobody would ever trailer to. The 779 named ones are the water people talk about at a ramp. The gap between those two numbers is 1,597 water bodies the source data carries without a name, and they are drawn anyway, because on the way to somewhere else it is still worth knowing what is water and what is not.
Seventy named lakes come in over a square kilometer, which is about 247 acres. That is the working set. Below that size you can stand at the ramp and see most of what you are going to run. Above it, a cove can hold a flat you will not spot from the surface, and the trip from the ramp to the far end is long enough that you would rather know the depth before you are standing on top of it.
The largest single piece of water in the pack, Kentucky Lake, is 488.1 square kilometers, or 120,612 acres. That one lake accounts for more area than the next two on the list added together.
| Lake | Charted surface area |
|---|---|
| Kentucky Lake | 488 km² (120,612 acres) |
| Lake Barkley | 199 km² (49,223 acres) |
| Pickwick Lake | 139 km² (34,323 acres) |
| Watts Bar Lake | 135 km² (33,285 acres) |
| Cherokee Lake | 118 km² (29,282 acres) |
| Douglas Lake | 118 km² (29,084 acres) |
| Dallas Lake | 110 km² (27,083 acres) |
| Dale Hollow Lake | 103 km² (25,402 acres) |
| Norris Lake | 94 km² (23,178 acres) |
| Center Hill Lake | 70 km² (17,199 acres) |
| Wilson Lake | 63 km² (15,469 acres) |
| Tellico Lake | 61 km² (15,098 acres) |
The twelve largest named lakes the Tennessee pack carries, by charted surface area, measured from the chart polygon itself. The pack carries 2,376 charted water bodies in all, 779 of them named, and 70 named lakes larger than one square kilometer.
NOAA charts the coast. Nobody sends a survey launch out onto an impoundment and publishes a chart of it, which is why an inland lake shows up in a lot of navigation apps as a blue shape with a name printed across it. Helm builds the depth instead. The water body comes from the National Hydrography Dataset, and what is under it comes from state elevation surveys, which measure the ground rather than the water.
On the water that difference is a contour instead of a color. An arm of the lake has a shape under it. The old creek channel reads as a line of deeper water running down the middle of that arm, and your own draft can be laid against the whole thing, so the ground your boat cannot cross shades on the screen while you still have room to turn.
A reservoir also sits at whatever level it is being held at this week, and that is the part to keep in your head while you read a contour on one. A contour is a shape at an elevation. Pull the lake down several feet and every contour is still exactly where it was on the ground, but the water has drawn back across the flats and the shoreline in front of you is a different line. The channel stays the channel. The shoulders on either side of it are where the change shows, and those shoulders are what turn a run you have made fifty times into a slower one in a drawdown year.
Kentucky Lake leads by a wide margin at 488.1 square kilometers, 120,612 acres. Lake Barkley is second at 199.2 square kilometers and 49,223 acres, which is less than half. After those two the list tightens up. Pickwick Lake at 138.9 square kilometers and Watts Bar Lake at 134.7 are 1,038 acres apart, close enough that neither one is meaningfully the bigger day. Cherokee Lake at 118.5 and Douglas Lake at 117.7 sit within a single square kilometer of each other.
Dale Hollow Lake at 102.8 square kilometers (25,402 acres) and Norris Lake at 93.8 (23,178 acres) each come to roughly a fifth of Kentucky Lake, which still leaves both of them more water than you will cover in a morning. Center Hill Lake is 69.6 square kilometers, Wilson Lake 62.6, Tellico Lake 61.1. J Percy Priest Reservoir at 56.5 and Fort Loudoun Lake at 55.5 are another near tie, as are Fontana Lake at 38.2 and Barren River Lake at 38.1, which are a tenth of a square kilometer apart. Tims Ford Lake at 31.2 and South Holston Lake at 30.1 finish out the twenty largest named waters in the pack.
This pack covers a rectangle of the map, so its edge does not follow the state line, and water sitting near a border is carried on both sides of it. That is on purpose. A lake on a line is one lake when you are out on it, and a chart that stopped halfway across because of a boundary drawn on dry ground would be no use to anybody.
The packs next door are Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia. If the water you run sits near the edge of this box, pulling down the neighbor gets you the rest of the map around the same shoreline. Packs come down at home on wifi and keep working after the phone loses its bars, which is worth doing the night before rather than in the parking lot at the ramp.
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.
Yes. Both are in the Tennessee pack, Kentucky Lake at 488.1 square kilometers (120,612 acres) and Lake Barkley at 199.2 square kilometers (49,223 acres), and the depth on them is built from state elevation surveys rather than from a nautical chart. Enter your draft and the water your boat cannot cross shades on the chart.
It carries 2,376 charted water bodies. Of those, 779 are named, and 70 of the named ones are larger than a square kilometer, which is about 247 acres. The rest are smaller water that the hydrography data records without a name, and it is drawn on the chart too.
Yes, once the Tennessee pack is on the device. Download it at home over wifi and the chart, the depth shading, routing and the measure tool keep working with no signal. Norris Lake is 93.8 square kilometers (23,178 acres) and Dale Hollow Lake is 102.8 square kilometers (25,402 acres), so both are covered by that one pack.
Helm Boating