Lake Bernard

Where Lake Bernard is

Lake Bernard lies in the District of Parry Sound, with shoreline in the Village of Sundridge and the Township of Strong.

How deep is Lake Bernard?

Lake Bernard reaches a maximum recorded depth of 48.5 meters, determined from 10,615 soundings taken during Ontario’s 2009 survey.

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.

Lake Bernard Aerial Photography

Ontario photographs the province from the air on a rolling schedule.

The photograph below is from the COOP2021 collection, flown in 2021.

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.

Lake Bernard has 8 Lake Partner monitoring sites. Five 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 337/1 at Main Basin-deep spot, sampled over 19 springs to 2024. Its long-term mean phosphorus concentration is 6.72 micrograms per litre, within the oligotrophic band, which extends to 10. The site’s 107 clarity readings give a median Secchi depth of 4.2 meters.

Water temperature

Ontario’s aquatic resource records class Lake Bernard as a cold-water lake, with a mean depth of 16 meters against its maximum of 48.5.

A deep lake separates into layers through the summer. Sunlight and wind warm and mix the upper few meters, and beneath a band of rapid cooling, the thermocline, the water stays cold through the whole season. A mean depth of 16 meters places most of Lake Bernard’s volume in that cold layer, which is the condition lake trout and lake whitefish require.

No provincial monitoring station records water temperature on Lake Bernard. 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 Lake Bernard 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 Lake Bernard

Ontario’s aquatic resource records name 22 fish species in Lake Bernard. The province classes the lake as cold water. The record took effect on 30 August 2016, and it compiles what field biologists had reported by then.

Twelve of the 22 species in the province’s records

• Lake Trouttrout and whitefish
• Brook Trouttrout and whitefish
• Rainbow Trouttrout and whitefish
• Lake Whitefishtrout and whitefish
• Ciscotrout and whitefish
• Yellow Perchperch
• Smallmouth Basssunfish
• Black Crappiesunfish
• Rock Basssunfish
• Pumpkinseedsunfish
• Burbotcod
• Brown Bullheadcatfish

Spawning areas

Ontario maps 15 fish spawning records within the Lake Bernard outline: 15 lake trout spawning areas covering 1.8 hectares. Every record is recorded as verified and presently suitable, and none is classed as sensitive.

By number of records

By area mapped

• Lake Trout15 areas1.8 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 Lake Bernard run from 1946 to 2015 and hold 58 releases. Lake Trout account for most of the fish: 100,283 released in 31 of the years between 1946 and 2015. The last recorded release was 2,000 lake trout yearlings in 2015.

The province’s current stocking programme, recorded from 2017, lists 23,316 lake trout released into Lake Bernard between 2017 and 2025.

Eating the fish

The 2025 Guide to Eating Ontario Fish carries consumption advice for five species taken from Lake Bernard, tested for contaminants at a sampling location in Strong Twp., Parry Sound Dist. 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 15

Lake Bernard lies in Fisheries Management Zone 15. Ontario sets its fishing seasons and catch limits by zone. Zone 15 covers central Ontario from Georgian Bay to the Ottawa River, bounded to the north by the Pickerel River, Highway 522 and the northern edge of Algonquin Park. It takes in Parry Sound, Huntsville, Bracebridge, Bancroft, Pembroke and Renfrew, and the whole of Algonquin Provincial Park. The province describes it as a zone of many natural lake trout and brook trout lakes, with a well-developed road network and moderate angling effort.

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 Lake Bernard.

Lake Bernard Ice Fishing

An ice hut on Lake Bernard must be removed by March 31. Lake Bernard lies in fisheries management zone 15, 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 15 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 Lake Bernard. The province’s nearest long record covers eight lakes near Dorset, about 66 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 Lake Bernard on any given day. Ontario publishes ice safety guidance for anyone going out on the ice, at ontario.ca.

Getting on the water

Four access marks are mapped on Lake Bernard: one boat launch, two beaches and one dam. Two are Ontario’s own records and two are from the Overture Places dataset, and the list under the map says which is which. Boat launch is the province’s class for a ramp.

Islands and names

Lake Bernard contains two islands in the Ontario Hydro Network’s outline, of 0.3 hectares, none of them named in the province’s register.

Lake Bernard is widely described as the largest lake in the world without an island. The province’s outline holds two, each a fraction of a hectare, one at the northern shore and one at the eastern. Whether either stands clear of the mainland at low water has not been confirmed, and the claim and the outline are both recorded here as they stand.

Nearby lakes

• Pickerel Lake9 km away
• Eagle Lake13 km away
• Lake Cecebe19 km away
• Sand Lake21 km away

All lakes

Questions about Lake Bernard

• How deep is Lake Bernard?

  Its maximum recorded depth is 48.5 meters, determined during Ontario’s 2009 survey.

• How big is Lake Bernard?

  Its surface covers 21.0 square kilometers and it holds 2 islands. Of its 26 kilometers of shoreline, 25 kilometers is the mainland shore and 1 kilometers is the shore of the islands.

• What fish are in Lake Bernard?

  Ontario’s aquatic resource records name 22 species, among them lake trout, smallmouth bass, lake whitefish, yellow perch, black crappie and brook trout.

• Is the water clear?

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

• Is there a public boat launch?

  Records mark one boat launch, two beaches and one dam on Lake Bernard.