Lake Champlain, Vermont’s “Great Lake” | New England by the Numbers

1609
year French explorer Samuel de Champlain sailed into the Lake Champlain region

6.8 trillion
gallons of water: Champlain’s estimated volume

120 & 12
miles: Champlain’s length and maximum width, more than three times the size of New England’s second-largest lake, Moosehead in Maine

fifty-four
public beaches

4000
canal boats plying Champlain’s waters between 1819 and 1940

Three Hundred
documented shipwrecks on the lake’s bottom

eighty-one
species of fish in the lake

1
illustrious and oft-sighted lake monster, “Champ”

450-480 million
years: age of Champlain’s Chazy Reef, one of the oldest in the world

400
feet: Champlain’s maximum depth

seventy-one
islands (including one that’s an entire county)

27
daily round-trip summer ferry crossings between Charlotte, Vermont, and Essex, New York

300
recorded sightings of “Champ” since 1609