Dog Lake

Where Dog Lake is

Dog Lake lies in the District of Thunder Bay.

How deep is Dog Lake?

The deepest mapped contour on Dog Lake is 100.0 meters, and the water within that boundary descends even farther. Ontario’s bathymetry record holds 209 depth contours for Dog 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.

No monitoring site on Dog Lake is registered with the Lake Partner Program, so no phosphorus or clarity record exists for the lake.

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.

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

Dog Lake Weather

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

Dog Lake weather

Water temperature

Ontario’s aquatic resource records class Dog Lake as a cool-water lake, with a mean depth of 29.6 meters against its maximum of 100.

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 Dog Lake. The LastLake model computes the temperature of its surface water for each day from the daily mean air temperature at Environment Canada’s Thunder Bay A climate station, 48 kilometers from the lake, or the next nearest station when its record is incomplete, and from the lake’s area of 14,592 hectares and its mean depth of 29.6 meters.

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

See also Lake Water Temperature in Ontario

Fish in Dog Lake

Ontario’s aquatic resource records name 14 fish species in Dog Lake. The province’s other records for the lake name two further species, lake trout and splake. They appear in the records below.

Popular species in the province’s records

• Lake Whitefishtrout and whitefish
• Ciscotrout and whitefish
• Northern Pikepike
• Walleyeperch
• Yellow Perchperch
• Smallmouth Basssunfish
• Burbotcod

Stocking history

Ontario’s stocking records for Dog Lake run from 1999 to 2004 and hold 30 releases. Splake account for most of the fish: 246,293 released in six of the years between 1999 and 2004. The last recorded release was 24,313 splake yearlings in 2004.

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

Eating the fish

The 2026 Guide to Eating Ontario Fish carries consumption advice for seven species taken from Dog Lake, tested for contaminants at a sampling location northwest of Thunder Bay, Thunder Bay Dist. 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 6

Dog Lake lies in Fisheries Management Zone 6. Ontario sets its fishing seasons and catch limits by zone.

Fisheries management zones around Dog Lake

Zone-wide, Smelt may not be used as bait or possessed for use as bait except where exceptions apply.

See also Fishing Seasons in Ontario, Zone by Zone and Fish Stocking in Ontario Lakes

Islands and names

Dog Lake contains 121 islands in the Ontario Hydro Network’s outline, twelve of them over 10 hectares and 36 under a tenth of a hectare. One of them lies mostly inside wetland the province’s Wetland With Significance dataset maps as marsh.

Official names

Ontario’s geographic names register lists 10 official names on the water and its islands: 1 island and seven bays. A further 1 named point stands on the mainland shore.

Bays 7

• Buda Bay
• Creighton Bay
• East Bay
• Hawk Bay
• North Bay
• Stirrett Bay
• Walberg Bay

Points on the shore 1

• Bad Point

Nearby lakes

• Hawkeye Lake10 km away
• Lower Shebandowan Lake52 km away
• Middle Shebandowan Lake58 km away
• Whitefish Lake71 km away

All lakes

Questions about Dog Lake

• How deep is Dog Lake?

  Its deepest charted contour is 100 meters, and the water within it is deeper.

• How big is Dog Lake?

  Its surface covers 145.9 square kilometers and it holds 121 islands. Of its 373 kilometers of shoreline, 294 kilometers is the mainland shore and 79 kilometers is the shore of the islands.

• What fish are in Dog Lake?

  Ontario’s aquatic resource records name fourteen species, among them walleye, smallmouth bass, northern pike, lake whitefish and yellow perch. The lake’s spawning, consumption and stocking records also name lake trout and splake.