Whitefish Lake

Where Whitefish Lake is

Whitefish Lake lies in the District of Thunder Bay.

How deep is Whitefish Lake?

The deepest mapped contour on Whitefish Lake is 6.0 meters, and the water within that boundary descends even farther. Ontario’s bathymetry record holds 14 depth contours for Whitefish 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.

Whitefish Lake has 4 Lake Partner monitoring sites. Two have reported phosphorus for the three or more years the province requires before a status is assigned. One of those sites is classified oligotrophic and one mesotrophic.

The longest record is held by site 5861/1 at W end, with phosphorus sampled once a year over 6 years to 2018. Its long-term mean phosphorus concentration is 11.22 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 5861/1 give a median Secchi depth of 3.85 meters.

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

Whitefish Lake Weather

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

Whitefish Lake weather

Water temperature

Ontario’s aquatic resource records class Whitefish Lake as a cool-water lake, with a mean depth of 3.1 meters against its maximum of 6.

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 Whitefish Lake. The LastLake model computes the temperature of its surface water for each day from the daily mean air temperature at Environment Canada’s Thunder Bay Cs climate station, 52 kilometers from the lake, or the next nearest station when its record is incomplete, and from the lake’s area of 3,000 hectares and its mean depth of 3.1 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 Whitefish Lake carries the model’s figures for the past weeks and the coming week.

See also Lake Water Temperature in Ontario

Fish in Whitefish Lake

Ontario’s aquatic resource records name 5 fish species in Whitefish Lake.

Popular species in the province’s records

• Northern Pikepike
• Walleyeperch
• Yellow Perchperch
• Smallmouth Basssunfish

Eating the fish

The 2026 Guide to Eating Ontario Fish carries consumption advice for three species taken from Whitefish Lake, tested for contaminants at a sampling location southwest of Thunder Bay, Strange & Lismore Twps. 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 6

Whitefish Lake lies in Fisheries Management Zone 6. Ontario sets its fishing seasons and catch limits by zone.

Fisheries management zones around Whitefish Lake

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

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

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

Nearby lakes

• Lower Shebandowan Lake45 km away
• Middle Shebandowan Lake51 km away
• Upper Shebandowan Lake55 km away
• Hawkeye Lake66 km away

All lakes

Questions about Whitefish Lake

• How deep is Whitefish Lake?

  Its deepest charted contour is 6 meters, and the water within it is deeper.

• How big is Whitefish Lake?

  Its surface covers 30.0 square kilometers and it holds 5 islands. Of its 36 kilometers of shoreline, 32 kilometers is the mainland shore and 4 kilometers is the shore of the islands.

• What fish are in Whitefish Lake?

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