A fun park and play surf wave in a section that is mostly flat or fast moving water. Hard eddy lines, boils and a bouncy surf are there at higher levels.
Put in by walking across the train tracks on a well-beaten track.
The wave (sometimes more of a hole) stretches across the entire river, with two powerful eddies on river right and river left that provide eddy service and will essentially carry you back up. It is formed by a shelf that drops off at the bottom. Great place to practice combat rolling, as if you don't roll right away, you'll be swallowed up in the boils/small whirlpools below and need to wait it out before rolling.
At levels from 250-350, the wave is a bit more retentive, and can be side surfed.
At 350-750 cfs on the Williamstown gauge, the wave is a fun, bouncy, surf, with strong boils and funny water in the runout. It's possible to catch the wave from either side, good practice to surf in on the V from river right. At this level, a playboat is much preferred for surfing as longer boats tend to get caught in the downstream flow and flipped. At medium to low levels a fun seam opens up on river right, where you can side surf and practice flat spins.
At 1500+ cfs, the surfing wave becomes a cycling monster, where it switches from a glassy wave to a monster breaking wave in ~15 secs. Haven't tried to surf it yet, but I'm hesistant to say it'd be surfable, as the monster breaking wave is pointed downstream and looks super flushy.
Note: I'm still working out the correlation between these two USGS gauges, one
downstream (Eagle Bridge, NY) and one
upstream (Williamstown, MA). For now, I have more beta on the upstream gauge correlation, but the downstream gauge may be a better indication of actually how much water is in the river. Neither gauge is great though, as there are multiple dams in between the upstream gauge and the playspot and the playspot and the downstream gauge. These dams change water levels significantly.
A good rule of thumb is that it pretty much always runs. The surfing experience at 300 vs. 600 is not wildly different.