Frederick House Lake

Where Frederick House Lake is

Frederick House Lake lies in the District of Cochrane, with shoreline in the Town of Iroquois Falls and the City of Timmins.

How deep is Frederick House Lake?

The deepest mapped contour on Frederick House Lake is 15.2 meters, and the water within that boundary descends even farther. Ontario’s bathymetry record holds 17 depth contours for Frederick House 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.

Frederick House Lake has 10 Lake Partner monitoring sites. Three have reported phosphorus for the three or more years the province requires before a status is assigned. Two of those sites are classified mesotrophic and one eutrophic.

The longest record is held by site 1574/1 at N57, M75 Barbers Bay N, with phosphorus sampled once a year over 5 years to 2010. Its long-term mean phosphorus concentration is 20.94 micrograms per litre, within the eutrophic band, which begins at 20.

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 2 clarity readings at site 1574/1 give a median Secchi depth of 1.75 meters.

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

Frederick House Lake Weather

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

Frederick House Lake weather

Water temperature

Ontario’s aquatic resource records class Frederick House Lake as a cool-water lake, with a mean depth of 5.9 meters against its maximum of 15.2.

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 Frederick House Lake. The LastLake model computes the temperature of its surface water for each day from the daily mean air temperature at Environment Canada’s Timmins A climate station, 34 kilometers from the lake, or the next nearest station when its record is incomplete, and from the lake’s area of 4,092 hectares and its mean depth of 5.9 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 Frederick House Lake carries the model’s figures for the past weeks and the coming week.

See also Lake Water Temperature in Ontario

Fish in Frederick House Lake

Ontario’s aquatic resource records name 6 fish species in Frederick House Lake. The province’s other records for the lake name two further species. They appear in the records below.

Popular species in the province’s records

• Lake Whitefishtrout and whitefish
• Northern Pikepike
• Walleyeperch
• Saugerperch
• Yellow Perchperch

Stocking history

Ontario’s stocking records for Frederick House Lake run from 1947 to 1948 and hold 2 releases. Walleye account for most of the fish: 300,000 released in two of the years between 1947 and 1948. The last recorded release was 100,000 walleye frys in 1948.

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

Eating the fish

The 2026 Guide to Eating Ontario Fish carries consumption advice for six species taken from Frederick House Lake, tested for contaminants at a sampling location in Evelyn & Dundonald Twps., Cochrane 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 8

Frederick House Lake lies in Fisheries Management Zone 8. Ontario sets its fishing seasons and catch limits by zone.

Fisheries management zones around Frederick House Lake

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

Islands and names

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

Official names

Ontario’s geographic names register lists 3 official names on the water and its islands: two bays. A further 1 named point stands on the mainland shore.

Bays 2

• Barbers Bay
• Buffalo Bay

Points on the shore 1

• Deadman's Point

Nearby lakes

• Night Hawk Lake23 km away
• Porcupine Lake28 km away
• Watabeag Lake54 km away
• Sesekinika Lake73 km away

All lakes

Questions about Frederick House Lake

• How deep is Frederick House Lake?

  Its deepest charted contour is 15.2 meters, and the water within it is deeper.

• How big is Frederick House Lake?

  Its surface covers 40.9 square kilometers and it holds 4 islands. Of its 53 kilometers of shoreline, 51 kilometers is the mainland shore and 2 kilometers is the shore of the islands.

• What fish are in Frederick House Lake?

  Ontario’s aquatic resource records name six species, among them walleye, northern pike, lake whitefish and yellow perch.