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. The water bodies themselves come from the USGS National Hydrography Dataset, which draws the shoreline and the name.
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.
A reservoir sits at whatever level it is being held at, and several of the largest here are reservoirs. The basin stays where it is when the level moves, and so does the charted shoreline. On a drawn down reservoir 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.
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 and named 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 and the measure tool 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.
The state lake packs draw lake shorelines and names from the USGS National Hydrography Dataset, and a reservoir sits at whatever level it is being held at that week. Treat the shape 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.
It shows the lakes by name and shoreline from the USGS National Hydrography Dataset, from Bantam Lake at 939 acres and Edgartown Great Pond at 865 down to the 2,389 named waters smaller than a square kilometer, which is roughly 247 acres. Minnesota is the state lake pack that also has depth contours.
Yes, for the shape of the water and the name. The charted shoreline is a fixed outline, so when the level drops the real shoreline moves in and everything under you is shallower by about that much. Check the day's level and give the flats a wide berth.
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