Calabogie Lake

Where Calabogie Lake is

Calabogie Lake lies in the County of Renfrew, within the Township of Greater Madawaska.

How deep is Calabogie Lake?

The deepest mapped contour on Calabogie Lake is 24.4 meters, and the water within that boundary descends even farther. Ontario’s bathymetry record holds 22 depth contours for Calabogie 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.

Calabogie Lake has 7 Lake Partner monitoring sites. Five have reported phosphorus for the three or more years the province requires before a status is assigned. Four of those sites are classified oligotrophic and one mesotrophic.

The longest record is held by site 691/6 at South West, deep spot, with phosphorus sampled once a year over 10 years to 2024. Its long-term mean phosphorus concentration is 8.35 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 46 clarity readings at site 691/6 give a median Secchi depth of 3.5 meters.

Median Secchi depth by year at site 691/6

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

Calabogie Lake Weather

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

Calabogie Lake weather

Water temperature

Ontario’s aquatic resource records class Calabogie Lake as a cool-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 Calabogie Lake. The LastLake model computes the temperature of its surface water for each day from the daily mean air temperature at Environment Canada’s Appleton climate station, 50 kilometers from the lake, or the next nearest station when its record is incomplete, and from the lake’s area of 1,356 hectares and its mean depth. The province’s records give no mean depth for Calabogie Lake; the model uses 4.8 meters, estimated from the lake’s depth contours.

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 Calabogie Lake carries the model’s figures for the past weeks and the coming week.

See also Lake Water Temperature in Ontario

Fish in Calabogie Lake

Ontario’s aquatic resource records name one fish species in Calabogie Lake: northern pike. The province’s other records for the lake name nine further species, among them walleye, black crappie and cisco. They appear in the records below.

Popular species in the province’s records

• Ciscotrout and whitefish
• Northern Pikepike
• Walleyeperch
• Yellow Perchperch
• Smallmouth Basssunfish
• Largemouth Basssunfish
• Black Crappiesunfish

Spawning areas

Ontario maps 3 fish spawning records within the Calabogie Lake outline: 3 walleye spawning areas covering 9.54 hectares. Every record is recorded as verified and presently suitable, and none is classed as sensitive.

By number of records

By area mapped

• Walleye3 areas9.5 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 Calabogie Lake run from 1946 to 2000 and hold 47 releases. Walleye account for most of the fish: 8,485,088 released in eighteen of the years between 1946 and 2000. The last recorded release was 32,000 walleye fingerlings in 2000.

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

Eating the fish

The 2026 Guide to Eating Ontario Fish carries consumption advice for eight species taken from Calabogie Lake, tested for contaminants at a sampling location in Blithfield & Bagot Twps., Renfrew Co. 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. 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

Calabogie 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 Calabogie 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

Calabogie Lake Ice Fishing

An ice hut on Calabogie 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). Calabogie 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 conditions

No public record reports the thickness or the condition of the ice on Calabogie 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 and When the Lakes Will Freeze This Winter

Islands and names

Calabogie Lake contains fifteen islands in the Ontario Hydro Network’s outline, zero of them over 10 hectares and nine under a tenth of a hectare. Ten of them lie mostly inside wetland the province’s Wetland With Significance dataset maps as marsh. The largest of these, at 2.2 hectares, falls inside the Grassy Bay wetland.

Official names

Ontario’s geographic names register lists 10 official names on the water and its islands: 2 islands and eight bays. A further 4 named points stand on the mainland shore.

Bays 8

• Black Bay
• Camerons Bay
• Grassy Bay
• Legrees Bay
• Little Sand Bay
• McNeelys Bay
• Nettletons Bay
• Sand Bay

Points on the shore 4

• Barnets Point
• Bluff Point
• Donnellys Point
• Eagle Point

Nearby lakes

• White Lake18 km away
• Black Donald Lake18 km away
• Constant Lake23 km away
• Centennial Lake28 km away

All lakes

Questions about Calabogie Lake

• How deep is Calabogie Lake?

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

• How big is Calabogie Lake?

  Its surface covers 13.6 square kilometers and it holds 15 islands. Of its 40 kilometers of shoreline, 37 kilometers is the mainland shore and 3 kilometers is the shore of the islands.

• What fish are in Calabogie Lake?

  Ontario’s aquatic resource records name one species: northern pike. The lake’s spawning, consumption and stocking records also name walleye, black crappie, cisco and largemouth bass.