Golden Lake

Where Golden Lake is

Golden Lake lies in the County of Renfrew, with shoreline in the Township of Bonnechere Valley, the Township of North Algona Wilberforce and the Township of Killaloe, Hagarty and Richards.

How deep is Golden Lake?

The deepest mapped contour on Golden Lake is 24.4 meters, and the water within that boundary descends even farther. Ontario’s bathymetry record holds 44 depth contours for Golden Lake.

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 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.

Golden 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. All are classified oligotrophic.

The longest record is held by site 1675/3 at Mid Lake, deep spot, sampled over 9 springs to 2024. Its long-term mean phosphorus concentration is 8.93 micrograms per litre, within the oligotrophic band, which extends to 10. The site’s 30 clarity readings give a median Secchi depth of 3.5 meters.

Water temperature

Ontario’s aquatic resource records class Golden Lake as a cold-water lake, with a mean depth of 8.5 meters against its maximum of 24.4.

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 Golden 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 Golden 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 Golden Lake

Ontario’s aquatic resource records name 28 fish species in Golden Lake. The province classes the lake as cold water. The record took effect on 15 October 2010, and it compiles what field biologists had reported by then.

Fourteen of the 28 species in the province’s records

• Lake Trouttrout and whitefish
• Lake Whitefishtrout and whitefish
• Ciscotrout and whitefish
• Northern Pikepike
• Muskellungepike
• Walleyeperch
• Yellow Perchperch
• Smallmouth Basssunfish
• Largemouth Basssunfish
• Black Crappiesunfish
• Rock Basssunfish
• Pumpkinseedsunfish
• Burbotcod
• Brown Bullheadcatfish

Spawning areas

Ontario maps 14 fish spawning records within the Golden Lake outline, for two 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

• Walleye13 areas211.8 ha
• Northern Pike1 area33.0 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 Golden Lake run from 1946 to 2014 and hold 19 releases. Walleye account for most of the fish: 2,380,966 released in eleven of the years between 1946 and 2014. The last recorded release was 1,972 walleye fingerlings in 2014.

The province’s current stocking programme, recorded from 2018, lists 15,260 walleye released into Golden Lake between 2018 and 2025.

Eating the fish

The 2025 Guide to Eating Ontario Fish carries consumption advice for thirteen species taken from Golden Lake, tested for contaminants at a sampling location in N. & S. Algona Twps., Renfrew 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 15

Golden Lake 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.

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

Golden Lake Ice Fishing

An ice hut on Golden Lake must be removed by March 31. Golden Lake 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

Ice has been recorded on Golden Lake in seventeen winters between 1955 and 1972. The median date of complete ice cover is December 18 and the median date of complete ice loss is April 24, a median season of 131 days.

The longest recorded season is 144 days in 1971-72, and the shortest is 109 days in 1967-68.

The record was contributed by W. R. Skinner, Environment Canada to the Global Lake and River Ice Phenology Database, and the ice was read at a weather station rather than from the middle of the lake. Observations were last contributed for 1972, and none have been added since.

Ice conditions

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

Islands and names

Golden Lake contains 19 islands in the Ontario Hydro Network’s outline, one of them over 10 hectares and ten under a tenth of a hectare. One of them lies inside a wetland mapped in the province’s Wetland With Significance dataset. Big Island, at 11 hectares, is larger than the next ten together, which cover 6.5.

Official names

Ontario’s geographic names register lists 12 official names on the water and its islands: 4 islands and six bays. A further 4 named points stand on the mainland shore.

Bays 6

• Harris Bay
• Hoffmans Bay
• Mundts Bay
• O'Connors Bay
• Ruby Bay
• Skellys Bay

Points on the shore 4

• Black Point
• Hoffmans Point
• Long Point
• Thomas Point

Nearby lakes

• Lake Doré16 km away
• Round Lake18 km away
• Lake Clear19 km away
• Constant Lake32 km away

All lakes

Questions about Golden Lake

• How deep is Golden Lake?

  Its deepest charted contour is 24.4 meters, and the water within it is deeper.

• How big is Golden Lake?

  Its surface covers 36.2 square kilometers and it holds 19 islands. Of its 61 kilometers of shoreline, 56 kilometers is the mainland shore and 5 kilometers is the shore of the islands.

• What fish are in Golden Lake?

  Ontario’s aquatic resource records name 28 species, among them lake trout, walleye, smallmouth bass, largemouth bass, northern pike and muskellunge.

• Is the water clear?

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