Balsam Lake

Where Balsam Lake is

Balsam Lake lies within the City of Kawartha Lakes.

How deep is Balsam Lake?

The deepest mapped contour on Balsam Lake is 12.2 meters, and the water within that boundary descends even farther. The chart is drawn from 74 depth contours recorded during Ontario’s 1967 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.

Balsam Lake Aerial Photography

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

The photograph below is from the SCOOP2023 collection, flown in 2023 and 2024.

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.

Balsam Lake has 8 Lake Partner monitoring sites. Seven have reported phosphorus for the three or more years the province requires before a status is assigned. All are classified mesotrophic.

The longest record is held by site 6902/2 at N Bay Rocky Pt., sampled over 24 springs to 2025. Its long-term mean phosphorus concentration is 10.54 micrograms per litre, within the mesotrophic band, which runs from 10 to 20. The site’s 177 clarity readings give a median Secchi depth of 5.3 meters.

Water temperature

Ontario’s aquatic resource records class Balsam Lake as a warm-water lake, with a mean depth of 5 meters against its maximum of 12.2.

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 Balsam 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.

Satellite thermal imagery gives a surface reading on clear days: the Landsat sensors pass over Balsam Lake 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 Balsam Lake

Ontario’s aquatic resource records name 43 fish species in Balsam Lake. The province classes the lake as warm water. The record took effect on 31 May 2021, and it compiles what field biologists had reported by then.

Fourteen of the 43 species in the province’s records

• Ciscotrout and whitefish
• Northern Pikepike
• Muskellungepike
• Walleyeperch
• Yellow Perchperch
• Smallmouth Basssunfish
• Largemouth Basssunfish
• Black Crappiesunfish
• Rock Basssunfish
• Pumpkinseedsunfish
• Bluegillsunfish
• Burbotcod
• Brown Bullheadcatfish
• Common Carpminnow

Spawning areas

Ontario maps 36 fish spawning records within the Balsam Lake outline, for three species, all of them mapped areas. Every record is recorded as verified and presently suitable, and none is classed as sensitive.

By number of records

By area mapped

• Smallmouth Bass19 areas24.2 ha
• Muskellunge11 areas3.7 ha
• Largemouth Bass6 areas7.4 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 Balsam Lake run from 1946 to 1989 and hold 116 releases. Walleye account for most of the fish: 2,610,000 released in seven of the years between 1946 and 1954. The last recorded release was 874 muskellunge fingerlings in 1989.

The province’s current stocking programme, recorded from 2016, lists no release into Balsam Lake.

Eating the fish

The 2025 Guide to Eating Ontario Fish carries consumption advice for twelve species taken from Balsam Lake, tested for contaminants at a sampling location in Fenelon Twp., Victoria Co. 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 17

Balsam Lake lies in Fisheries Management Zone 17. Ontario sets its fishing seasons and catch limits by zone.

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.

Where a row reads zone-wide, the zone’s own season or limit above applies.

Balsam Lake Ice Fishing

An ice hut on Balsam Lake must be removed by March 1. Balsam Lake lies in fisheries management zone 17, 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 17 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 Balsam Lake. The province’s nearest long record covers eight lakes near Dorset, about 72 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 Balsam Lake on any given day. Ontario publishes ice safety guidance for anyone going out on the ice, at ontario.ca.

Getting on the water

Six access marks are mapped on Balsam Lake: three boat launches, two marinas and one beach. Three are Ontario’s own records and three 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

Balsam Lake contains 27 islands in the Ontario Hydro Network’s outline, one of them over 10 hectares and seven under a tenth of a hectare. Fifteen of them lie inside wetlands mapped in the province’s Wetland With Significance dataset. The largest two, of 1.9 and 1.1 hectares, fall inside the Balsam Lake South Bay Complex and Balsam Lake 14 wetlands. Grand Island, at 455 hectares, is larger than the next ten together, which cover 18.

Official names

Ontario’s geographic names register lists 15 official names on the water and its islands: 7 islands, three bays, three rocks and one river. A further 7 named points stand on the mainland shore.

Bays 3

• North Bay
• South Bay
• West Bay

Shoals and rocks 3

• Grand Rock
• Hogg Rock
• Togo Rock

Points on the shore 7

• Birch Point
• Daniels Point
• Indian Point
• Laidlaw Point
• Lightning Point
• Long Point
• Mackenzie Point

Communities on the lake 7

• Coboconk
• Rosedale
• Baddow
• Corsons
• Long Point
• Isaacs Glen
• Camp Kagawong

Nearby lakes

• Cameron Lake7 km away
• Mitchell Lake8 km away
• Four Mile Lake14 km away
• Shadow Lake15 km away

All lakes

Questions about Balsam Lake

• How deep is Balsam Lake?

  Its deepest charted contour is 12.2 meters, and the water within it is deeper.

• How big is Balsam Lake?

  Its surface covers 47.6 square kilometers and it holds 27 islands. Of its 93 kilometers of shoreline, 73 kilometers is the mainland shore and 20 kilometers is the shore of the islands.

• What fish are in Balsam Lake?

  Ontario’s aquatic resource records name 43 species, among them walleye, smallmouth bass, largemouth bass, northern pike, muskellunge and yellow perch.

• Is the water clear?

  All seven monitoring sites with a phosphorus status are classified mesotrophic, the middle of the province’s three bands.

• Is there a public boat launch?

  Records mark three boat launches, two marinas and one beach on Balsam Lake.