Missinaibi Lake

Where Missinaibi Lake is

Missinaibi Lake lies in the District of Sudbury and the District of Algoma.

How deep is Missinaibi Lake?

The deepest mapped contour on Missinaibi Lake is 76.2 meters, and the water within that boundary descends even farther. Ontario’s bathymetry record holds 100 depth contours for Missinaibi 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 Missinaibi 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

Missinaibi Lake Weather

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

Missinaibi Lake weather

Water temperature

Ontario’s aquatic resource records class Missinaibi 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 Missinaibi Lake. The LastLake model computes the temperature of its surface water for each day from the daily mean air temperature at Environment Canada’s Chapleau A climate station, 65 kilometers from the lake, or the next nearest station when its record is incomplete, and from the lake’s area of 8,056 hectares and its mean depth. The province’s records give no mean depth for Missinaibi Lake; the model uses 15.3 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 Missinaibi Lake carries the model’s figures for the past weeks and the coming week.

See also Lake Water Temperature in Ontario

Fish in Missinaibi Lake

Ontario’s aquatic resource records name 18 fish species in Missinaibi Lake.

Popular species in the province’s records

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

Spawning areas

Ontario maps 4 fish spawning records within the Missinaibi Lake outline, for two different species, and all of them are mapped below. Every record is recorded as verified and presently suitable, and none is classed as sensitive.

By number of records

By area mapped

• Walleye3 areas4.9 ha
• Northern Pike1 area4.1 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.

Eating the fish

The 2026 Guide to Eating Ontario Fish carries consumption advice for nine species taken from Missinaibi Lake, tested for contaminants at a sampling location in Algoma & Sudbury Dists. 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 7

Missinaibi Lake lies in Fisheries Management Zone 7. Ontario sets its fishing seasons and catch limits by zone.

Fisheries management zones around Missinaibi Lake

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

Islands and names

Missinaibi Lake contains 82 islands in the Ontario Hydro Network’s outline, four of them over 10 hectares and 27 under a tenth of a hectare.

Official names

Ontario’s geographic names register lists 13 official names on the water and its islands: 2 islands, eight bays, one narrows and one river. A further 3 named points stand on the mainland shore.

Bays 8

• Baltic Bay
• Barclay Bay
• Iron Bay
• Jenner Bay
• Last Bay
• Lee Bay
• Snake Arm Bay
• South Bay

Harbours, cuts and narrows 1

• The Narrows

Points on the shore 3

• Eli Point
• Fairy Point
• Red Granite Point

Nearby lakes

• White Lake151 km away
• Remi Lake157 km away
• Ranger Lake167 km away
• Porcupine Lake182 km away

All lakes

Questions about Missinaibi Lake

• How deep is Missinaibi Lake?

  Its deepest charted contour is 76.2 meters, and the water within it is deeper.

• How big is Missinaibi Lake?

  Its surface covers 80.5 square kilometers and it holds 82 islands. Of its 263 kilometers of shoreline, 228 kilometers is the mainland shore and 35 kilometers is the shore of the islands.

• What fish are in Missinaibi Lake?

  Ontario’s aquatic resource records name eighteen species, among them lake trout, walleye, smallmouth bass, northern pike, lake whitefish and yellow perch.