Watabeag Lake

Where Watabeag Lake is

Watabeag Lake lies in the District of Cochrane and the District of Timiskaming.

How deep is Watabeag Lake?

Watabeag Lake reaches a maximum recorded depth of 41.7 meters, determined from 99,559 soundings.

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.

Watabeag Lake has 11 Lake Partner monitoring sites. Five have reported phosphorus for the three or more years the province requires before a status is assigned. Three of those sites are classified oligotrophic and two mesotrophic.

The longest record is held by site 5747/1 at N76, N end, with phosphorus sampled once a year over 4 years to 2018. Its long-term mean phosphorus concentration is 10.0 micrograms per litre, within the mesotrophic band, which runs from 10 to 20.

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.

The 2 clarity readings at site 5747/1 give a median Secchi depth of 2.2 meters.

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

Watabeag Lake Weather

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

Watabeag Lake weather

Water temperature

Ontario’s aquatic resource records class Watabeag Lake as a cold-water lake, with a mean depth of 8.9 meters against its maximum of 41.7.

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 Watabeag Lake. The LastLake model computes the temperature of its surface water for each day from the daily mean air temperature at Environment Canada’s Kirkland Lake climate station, 40 kilometers from the lake, or the next nearest station when its record is incomplete, and from the lake’s area of 2,114 hectares and its mean depth of 8.9 meters.

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 Watabeag Lake carries the model’s figures for the past weeks and the coming week.

See also Lake Water Temperature in Ontario

Fish in Watabeag Lake

Ontario’s aquatic resource records name 20 fish species in Watabeag Lake. The province’s other records for the lake name two further species, brook trout and rainbow trout. 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
• Yellow Perchperch

Spawning areas

Ontario maps 3 fish spawning records within the Watabeag Lake outline: 3 lake trout spawning areas covering 0.28 hectares.

By number of records

By area mapped

• Lake Trout3 areas0.3 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 Watabeag Lake run from 1946 to 1990 and hold 34 releases. Lake Trout account for most of the fish: 149,275 released in 23 of the years between 1946 and 1990. The last recorded release was 2,000 lake trout yearlings in 1990.

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

Eating the fish

The 2026 Guide to Eating Ontario Fish carries consumption advice for three species taken from Watabeag Lake, tested for contaminants at a sampling location in Nordica Twp., Timiskaming 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. 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 8

Watabeag Lake lies in Fisheries Management Zone 8. Ontario sets its fishing seasons and catch limits by zone.

Fisheries management zones around Watabeag Lake

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

Islands and names

Watabeag Lake contains nineteen islands in the Ontario Hydro Network’s outline, two of them over 10 hectares and six under a tenth of a hectare. One of them lies mostly inside wetland the province’s Wetland With Significance dataset maps as fen. Big Island, at 46 hectares, is larger than the next ten together, which cover 14.

Official names

Ontario’s geographic names register lists 6 official names on the water and its islands: 2 islands, two bays and one narrows.

Bays 2

• Big Island Bay
• Sable Bay

Harbours, cuts and narrows 1

• The Narrows

Nearby lakes

• Sesekinika Lake24 km away
• Kenogami Lake27 km away
• Mistinikon Lake32 km away
• Night Hawk Lake39 km away

All lakes

Questions about Watabeag Lake

• How deep is Watabeag Lake?

  Its maximum recorded depth is 41.7 meters.

• How big is Watabeag Lake?

  Its surface covers 21.2 square kilometers and it holds 19 islands. Of its 96 kilometers of shoreline, 82 kilometers is the mainland shore and 14 kilometers is the shore of the islands.

• What fish are in Watabeag Lake?

  Ontario’s aquatic resource records name twenty species, among them lake trout, walleye, northern pike, lake whitefish and yellow perch. The lake’s spawning, consumption and stocking records also name brook trout and rainbow trout.