Minnitaki Lake

Where Minnitaki Lake is

Minnitaki Lake lies in the District of Kenora, with shoreline in the Municipality of Sioux Lookout.

How deep is Minnitaki Lake?

The deepest mapped contour on Minnitaki Lake is 45.7 meters, and the water within that boundary descends even farther. Ontario’s bathymetry record holds 618 depth contours for Minnitaki Lake.

See also Ontario's Largest and Deepest Lakes

Surveyed Depths

Ontario has surveyed the depths of several thousand of its lakes over more than half a century. Later surveys were conducted by boat with satellite positioning and produced hundreds of thousands of soundings per lake. Earlier surveys were charted by running transects across the water and drawing depth contours by hand.

Water quality

Ontario’s Lake Partner Program is a volunteer monitoring network. Participants collect water samples for phosphorus analysis and measure water clarity through the summer with a Secchi disk. Most sites are sampled for phosphorus once a year, in spring, and some several times a year between spring and fall. Phosphorus in many lakes rises through the summer, so the two kinds of average are measured on different bases.

Phosphorus is the nutrient that controls how much algae a lake can grow. A lake with little phosphorus stays clear and supports cold-water fish such as lake trout. As phosphorus rises, algae increase, the water clouds, and oxygen in the deep water falls as the algae decay. The province classifies each monitoring site by its average phosphorus:

• Oligotrophic, below 10 micrograms per litre: clear water and low algae.
• Mesotrophic, from 10 to 20: moderately productive water, with more algae and weed growth than an oligotrophic lake but rarely a bloom.
• Eutrophic, above 20: nutrient-rich water, prone to algal blooms and low oxygen at depth.

No monitoring site on Minnitaki Lake is registered with the Lake Partner Program, so no phosphorus or clarity record exists for the lake.

A Secchi disk is a white or black-and-white plate lowered on a marked line until it disappears from view. The depth at which it vanishes is the Secchi depth, a direct measure of water clarity. Clearer water gives a deeper reading.

See also Lake Water Quality and Blue-Green Algae in Ontario

Minnitaki Lake Weather

The weather page for Minnitaki Lake carries the forecast over the water, wave heights across the lake, and the modelled water temperature.

Minnitaki Lake weather

Water temperature

Ontario’s aquatic resource records class Minnitaki Lake as a cold-water lake.

A lake separates into layers through the summer where it is deep enough. Sunlight and wind warm and mix the upper few meters, and beneath a band of rapid cooling, the thermocline, the water stays cold. A shallow lake mixes to the bottom instead and warms through, sooner in spring and later into autumn.

No provincial monitoring station records water temperature on Minnitaki Lake. The LastLake model computes the temperature of its surface water for each day from the daily mean air temperature at Environment Canada’s Sioux Lookout A climate station, 20 kilometers from the lake, or the next nearest station when its record is incomplete, and from the lake’s area of 17,631 hectares and its mean depth. The province’s records give no mean depth for Minnitaki Lake; the model uses 9.6 meters, estimated from the lake’s depth contours.

Each day’s figure carries the model’s typical error for that month on lakes of the same size. The figure in the chart below is the temperature near the surface, away from the shoreline. Bays, shallows and water deeper below the surface differ in temperature. Temperature is not measured when ice covers the lake. The weather page for Minnitaki Lake carries the model’s figures for the past weeks and the coming week.

See also Lake Water Temperature in Ontario

Fish in Minnitaki Lake

Ontario’s aquatic resource records name 23 fish species in Minnitaki Lake. The province’s other records for the lake name three further species, among them muskellunge. They appear in the records below.

Popular species in the province’s records

• Lake Trouttrout and whitefish
• Lake Whitefishtrout and whitefish
• Ciscotrout and whitefish
• Northern Pikepike
• Walleyeperch
• Saugerperch
• Yellow Perchperch
• Smallmouth Basssunfish
• Rock Basssunfish
• Burbotcod

Spawning areas

Ontario maps 27 fish spawning records within the Minnitaki Lake outline, for three different species, and all of them are mapped below.

By number of records

By area mapped

• Lake Trout18 areas6.3 ha
• Walleye8 areas85.6 ha
• Northern Pike1 area140.9 ha

The federal Fisheries Act prohibits the harmful alteration, disruption or destruction of fish habitat without an authorization, so a dock, dredging, infill or shoreline work at a mapped spawning area is reviewed on that basis.

Stocking history

Ontario’s stocking records for Minnitaki Lake run from 1947 to 1968 and hold 29 releases. Walleye account for most of the fish: 12,704,000 released in thirteen of the years between 1947 and 1961. The last recorded release was 21 muskellunge juvenile/adults in 1968.

The province’s record of stocking for recreational fishing, kept from 2016, lists no release into Minnitaki Lake.

Eating the fish

The 2026 Guide to Eating Ontario Fish carries consumption advice for nine species taken from Minnitaki Lake, tested for contaminants at a sampling location in Kenora Dist. Each figure below is the most meals a month the guide advises for a fish of that length. Where mercury sets the advice, the figure falls as the fish gets longer, because mercury accumulates over a fish’s life. Where the guide has no result yet for certain contaminants at a location, it sets a precautionary limit of 16 meals a month. A zero means the guide advises no meals of that fish at that size.

General population: adultsSensitive population: children under fifteen, women who are or may become pregnant

Fisheries Management Zone 4

Minnitaki Lake lies in Fisheries Management Zone 4. Ontario sets its fishing seasons and catch limits by zone.

Fisheries management zones around Minnitaki Lake

Zone-wide, Smelt may not be used as bait or possessed for use as bait.

Where a row reads zone-wide, the zone’s own season or limit above applies.

See also Fishing Seasons in Ontario, Zone by Zone and Fish Stocking in Ontario Lakes

Islands and names

Minnitaki Lake contains 376 islands in the Ontario Hydro Network’s outline, 22 of them over 10 hectares and 143 under a tenth of a hectare. One of them lies mostly inside wetland the province’s Wetland With Significance dataset maps as fen.

Official names

Ontario’s geographic names register lists 25 official names on the water and its islands: 9 islands, ten bays, one narrows and one river. A further 4 named points stand on the mainland shore.

Bays 10

• Alcona Bay
• Donut Bay
• East Bay
• Lyons Bay
• Northeast Bay
• Redpine Bay
• Southeast Bay
• Southwest Bay
• Troutfish Bay
• Twin Bay

Harbours, cuts and narrows 1

• Redpine Narrows

Points on the shore 4

• Dinner Place Point
• Notlish Point
• Puller's Point
• Ranger's Point

Nearby lakes

• Abram Lake10 km away
• Pelican Lake16 km away
• Thunder Lake57 km away
• Dinorwic Lake60 km away

All lakes

Questions about Minnitaki Lake

• How deep is Minnitaki Lake?

  Its deepest charted contour is 45.7 meters, and the water within it is deeper.

• How big is Minnitaki Lake?

  Its surface covers 176.4 square kilometers and it holds 376 islands. Of its 687 kilometers of shoreline, 440 kilometers is the mainland shore and 247 kilometers is the shore of the islands.

• What fish are in Minnitaki Lake?

  Ontario’s aquatic resource records name 23 species, among them lake trout, walleye, smallmouth bass, northern pike, lake whitefish and yellow perch. The lake’s spawning, consumption and stocking records also name muskellunge.