Davis Lake

Where Davis Lake is

Davis Lake lies in the County of Haliburton, within the Township of Minden Hills.

How deep is Davis Lake?

The deepest mapped contour on Davis Lake is 28.0 meters, and the water within that boundary descends even farther. Ontario’s bathymetry record holds 27 depth contours for Davis 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.

Davis Lake has 2 Lake Partner monitoring sites. One of them has reported phosphorus for the three or more years the province requires before a status is assigned, and is classified oligotrophic.

The longest record is held by site 1117/1 at Mid Lake, deep spot, with phosphorus sampled once a year over 22 years to 2025. Its long-term mean phosphorus concentration is 7.8 micrograms per litre, within the oligotrophic band, which extends to 10.

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 253 clarity readings at site 1117/1 give a median Secchi depth of 4.3 meters.

Median Secchi depth by year at site 1117/1

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

Water temperature

Ontario’s aquatic resource records class Davis 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 Davis 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.

Water temperature at a depth of one meter (eight lakes near Dorset, ON)

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.

See also Lake Water Temperature in Ontario

Fish in Davis Lake

Ontario’s aquatic resource records name 5 fish species in Davis Lake. The province’s other records for the lake name one further species, brook trout. It appears in the records below.

Popular species in the province’s records

• Lake Trouttrout and whitefish
• Ciscotrout and whitefish
• Yellow Perchperch
• Smallmouth Basssunfish

Spawning areas

Ontario maps 6 fish spawning records within the Davis Lake outline: 6 lake trout spawning areas covering 0.25 hectares.

By number of records

By area mapped

• Lake Trout6 areas0.2 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 Davis Lake run from 1947 to 1995 and hold 30 releases. Lake Trout account for most of the fish: 36,570 released in 25 of the years between 1947 and 1995. The last recorded release was 1,200 lake trout yearlings in 1995.

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

Fisheries Management Zone 15

Davis Lake lies in Fisheries Management Zone 15. Ontario sets its fishing seasons and catch limits by zone. 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.

Fisheries management zones around Davis Lake

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

Davis Lake Ice Fishing

An ice hut on Davis Lake must be removed by March 31. The province sets dates for ice hut removal as a safety measure to ensure huts are removed before thawing occurs. One date applies to an entire fisheries management zone (FMZ). Davis Lake lies within FMZ 15.

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 FMZ 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.

Ice In / Out Date

No ice record is kept on Davis Lake. The province’s nearest long record covers eight lakes near Dorset, about 52 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 in date (eight lakes near Dorset, ON)

Ice out date (eight lakes near Dorset, ON)

Ice conditions

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

See also Lake Ice in Ontario

Islands and names

Davis Lake contains ten islands in the Ontario Hydro Network’s outline, zero of them over 10 hectares and nine under a tenth of a hectare.

Nearby lakes

• Moore Lake7 km away
• Gull Lake8 km away
• Shadow Lake11 km away
• Four Mile Lake12 km away

All lakes

Questions about Davis Lake

• How deep is Davis Lake?

  Its deepest charted contour is 28 meters, and the water within it is deeper.

• How big is Davis Lake?

  Its surface covers 1.1 square kilometers and it holds 10 islands. Of its 9 kilometers of shoreline, 8 kilometers is the mainland shore and 1 kilometer is the shore of the islands.

• What fish are in Davis Lake?

  Ontario’s aquatic resource records name five species, among them lake trout, smallmouth bass and yellow perch. The lake’s spawning, consumption and stocking records also name brook trout.

• Is the water clear?

  The one monitoring site with a phosphorus status is classified oligotrophic, the clearest of the province’s three bands.