Skootamatta Lake

Where Skootamatta Lake is

Skootamatta Lake lies in the County of Lennox and Addington, within the Township of Addington Highlands.

How deep is Skootamatta Lake?

The deepest mapped contour on Skootamatta Lake is 27.4 meters, and the water within that boundary descends even farther. Ontario’s bathymetry record holds 29 depth contours for Skootamatta Lake.

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 a water sample each spring for phosphorus analysis and measure water clarity through the summer with a Secchi disk.

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 spring phosphorus. Below 10 micrograms per litre is oligotrophic: clear water and low algae. From 10 to 20 is mesotrophic: moderately productive water, with more algae and weed growth than an oligotrophic lake but rarely a bloom. Above 20 is eutrophic: nutrient-rich water, prone to algal blooms and low oxygen at depth.

A Secchi disk is a 20 centimeter 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.

Skootamatta Lake has 6 Lake Partner monitoring sites. Six have reported phosphorus for the three or more years the province requires before a status is assigned. All are classified oligotrophic.

The longest record is held by site 4986/4 at Lower Basin-DeepSpot, sampled over 18 springs to 2025. Its long-term mean phosphorus concentration is 8.69 micrograms per litre, within the oligotrophic band, which extends to 10. The site’s 32 clarity readings give a median Secchi depth of 4.2 meters.

Water temperature

Ontario’s aquatic resource records class Skootamatta Lake as a cool-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 Skootamatta Lake. The province’s longest in-water record is kept on eight research lakes near Dorset, sampled since 1976. A reading is taken at the surface, at one meter, at each meter to seven and then every two meters to the bottom, about every two weeks through the open-water season and about monthly under ice. The record holds 5,240 readings at a depth of one meter.

At one meter the eight lakes track one another closely. On a day when several were sampled, the warmest and the coolest lake differed by about one degree in every month of the year, and a 12 meter deep lake and a 37 meter deep lake read within 0.2 degrees of each other from June to October. The weather of the year, and not the lake, sets most of the width of the band below.

Satellite thermal imagery gives a surface reading on clear days: the Landsat sensors pass over Skootamatta Lake every eight days at a resolution of 100 meters. In the province’s record the surface reading and the one meter reading agree to within half a degree nine times in ten in summer.

The water a few meters down is colder than any figure on this chart, in every month of the year.

How depth changes the temperature

The chart below is the province’s record on Harp Lake, 37 meters deep, drawn as the median temperature at each depth for each month over 49 years. In July the water at one meter is 23 degrees, at five meters 15, at seven meters 9, and from 13 meters to the bottom under 6. By October the warm layer has deepened to seven meters and cooled to 11 degrees. In February the whole column sits between 1 and 4 degrees under the ice, coldest at the top.

A shallower lake in the same record warms sooner. Heney Lake, six meters deep, reads about 1.8 degrees warmer than Harp Lake at one meter from January to May, 0.8 degrees warmer from June to August, and the same or cooler from September.

Fish in Skootamatta Lake

Ontario’s aquatic resource records name 19 fish species in Skootamatta Lake. The province classes the lake as cool water. The record took effect on 29 August 2018, and it compiles what field biologists had reported by then. The province’s other records for the lake name three further species, lake trout, brook trout and atlantic salmon. They appear in the records below.

Thirteen of the 22 species in the province’s records

• Lake Trouttrout and whitefish
• Lake Whitefishtrout and whitefish
• Ciscotrout and whitefish
• Northern Pikepike
• Muskellungepike
• Walleyeperch
• Yellow Perchperch
• Smallmouth Basssunfish
• Largemouth Basssunfish
• Rock Basssunfish
• Pumpkinseedsunfish
• Bluegillsunfish
• Burbotcod

Spawning areas

Ontario maps 68 fish spawning records within the Skootamatta Lake outline: 68 walleye spawning areas covering 1.1 hectares.

By number of records

By area mapped

• Walleye68 areas1.1 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 Skootamatta Lake run from 1946 to 1989 and hold 50 releases. Walleye account for most of the fish: 5,045,000 released in eleven of the years between 1946 and 1989. The last recorded release was 45,000 walleye frys in 1989.

The province’s current stocking programme, recorded from 2016, lists no release into Skootamatta Lake.

Eating the fish

The 2025 Guide to Eating Ontario Fish carries consumption advice for seven species taken from Skootamatta Lake, tested for contaminants at a sampling location in Anglesea Twp., Lennox & Addington Cos. Each figure below is the most meals a month the guide advises for a fish of that length. The advice falls as the fish gets longer, because mercury accumulates over a fish’s life. 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 18

Skootamatta Lake lies in Fisheries Management Zone 18. Ontario sets its fishing seasons and catch limits by zone.

The figures are the number of fish an angler may catch and keep in a day and have in possession, under a sport fishing licence and under a conservation licence. The rows are the whole zone’s, and they apply to every lake in it. No waterbody exception names Skootamatta Lake.

Skootamatta Lake Ice Fishing

An ice hut on Skootamatta Lake must be removed by March 15. Skootamatta Lake lies in fisheries management zone 18, one of the twenty zones Ontario sets its fishing rules by, and one removal date applies across the whole zone.

An ice hut must also be removed before the ice breaks up, whether or not that date has passed. The deadline clears huts from the ice ahead of the thaw and does not close the fishing season.

Registration is required in zone 18 for an ice hut built of anything other than fabric, and for a fabric tent covering seven square meters or more. Registration is free, and the number is displayed on the outside of the hut.

When the ice comes and goes

No ice record is kept on Skootamatta Lake. The province’s nearest long record covers eight lakes near Dorset, about 138 kilometers away. It holds a date for every winter since 1975, observed by eye and from cameras set on the shore.

On those eight lakes the median date of complete ice cover is December 7 and the median date of complete ice loss is April 20, a median season of 134 days.

The date the ice forms has moved later through the record: a November 26 average across 1971 to 1980, and December 11 across 2011 to 2020. The date it leaves has moved by less than a day each decade over the same period. The two charts below are drawn to one scale of 26 days, so they can be read against each other.

Ice conditions

No public record reports the thickness or the condition of the ice on Skootamatta Lake on any given day. Ontario publishes ice safety guidance for anyone going out on the ice, at ontario.ca.

Islands and names

Skootamatta Lake contains 30 islands in the Ontario Hydro Network’s outline, one of them over 10 hectares and eleven under a tenth of a hectare. Bible Island, at 59 hectares, is larger than the next ten together, which cover 12.

Official names

Ontario’s geographic names register lists 3 official names on the water and its islands: 2 islands and one bay.

Bays 1

• Jacques' Bay

Nearby lakes

• Kashwakamak Lake18 km away
• Buckshot Lake23 km away
• Big Gull Lake24 km away
• Kennebec Lake25 km away

All lakes

Questions about Skootamatta Lake

• How deep is Skootamatta Lake?

  Its deepest charted contour is 27.4 meters, and the water within it is deeper.

• How big is Skootamatta Lake?

  Its surface covers 12.1 square kilometers and it holds 30 islands. Of its 64 kilometers of shoreline, 53 kilometers is the mainland shore and 11 kilometers is the shore of the islands.

• What fish are in Skootamatta Lake?

  Ontario’s aquatic resource records name nineteen species, among them walleye, smallmouth bass, largemouth bass, northern pike, muskellunge and lake whitefish. The lake’s spawning, consumption and stocking records also name lake trout, brook trout and atlantic salmon.

• Is the water clear?

  All six monitoring sites with a phosphorus status are classified oligotrophic, the clearest of the province’s three bands.