Pelican Lake

Where Pelican Lake is

Pelican Lake lies in the District of Kenora, with shoreline in the Municipality of Sioux Lookout.

How deep is Pelican Lake?

The deepest mapped contour on Pelican Lake is 30.5 meters, and the water within that boundary descends even farther. Ontario’s bathymetry record holds 53 depth contours for Pelican 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.

Pelican Lake has 2 Lake Partner monitoring sites, none of which has yet reported phosphorus for the three years the province requires before a status is assigned.

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

Pelican Lake Weather

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

Pelican Lake weather

Water temperature

Ontario’s aquatic resource records class Pelican Lake as a cold-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 Pelican Lake. The LastLake model computes the temperature of its surface water for each day from the daily mean air temperature at Environment Canada’s Sioux Lookout A climate station, 4 kilometers from the lake, or the next nearest station when its record is incomplete, and from the lake’s area of 2,347 hectares and its mean depth. The province’s records give no mean depth for Pelican Lake; the model uses 10.7 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 Pelican Lake carries the model’s figures for the past weeks and the coming week.

See also Lake Water Temperature in Ontario

Fish in Pelican Lake

Ontario’s aquatic resource records name 18 fish species in Pelican Lake. The province’s other records for the lake name four further species, among them lake trout and muskellunge. They appear in the records below.

Popular species in the province’s records

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

Spawning areas

Ontario maps 4 fish spawning records within the Pelican Lake outline: 4 walleye spawning areas covering 91.79 hectares. Every record is recorded as verified and presently suitable, and none is classed as sensitive.

By number of records

By area mapped

• Walleye4 areas91.8 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 Pelican Lake run from 1947 to 1987 and hold 27 releases. Walleye account for most of the fish: 15,700,000 released in twelve of the years between 1947 and 1959. The last recorded release was 27 smallmouth bass subadults in 1987.

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

Eating the fish

The 2026 Guide to Eating Ontario Fish carries consumption advice for eight species taken from Pelican Lake, tested for contaminants at a sampling location in Kenora 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. Where the guide has no result yet for certain contaminants at a location, it sets a precautionary limit of 16 meals a month. 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 4

Pelican Lake lies in Fisheries Management Zone 4. Ontario sets its fishing seasons and catch limits by zone.

Fisheries management zones around Pelican Lake

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

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

Pelican Lake Ice Fishing

Ice In / Out Date

Ice has been recorded on Pelican Lake in 48 winters between 1928 and 1995. The median date of complete ice cover is November 25 and the median date of complete ice loss is May 9, a median season of 165 days.

The longest recorded season is 186 days in 1966-67, and the shortest is 139 days in 1983-84.

Averaged twenty winters at a time, the date of complete ice cover has barely moved: November 25 in the winters from 1960, and November 25 in those from 1980. Across the same two blocks the average season has gone from 167 days to 161.

Ice in to ice out by winter on Pelican Lake

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 1995, and none have been added since.

Ice conditions

No public record reports the thickness or the condition of the ice on Pelican 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

Pelican Lake contains twenty islands in the Ontario Hydro Network’s outline, two of them over 10 hectares and seven under a tenth of a hectare.

Official names

Ontario’s geographic names register lists 8 official names on the water and its islands: 2 islands, one bay and one narrows. A further 2 named points stand on the mainland shore. The register records the origin of one name: Equay Miniss, “Equay Miniss (Women's Island) recognizes the place of hiding used by Anishnaabe women and children during an ambush.”

Bays 1

• Moose Bay

Harbours, cuts and narrows 1

• Frog Rapids Narrows

Points on the shore 2

• Neelands Point
• Sioux Lookout Point

Nearby lakes

• Abram Lake8 km away
• Minnitaki Lake16 km away
• Lac Seul46 km away
• Thunder Lake63 km away

All lakes

Questions about Pelican Lake

• How deep is Pelican Lake?

  Its deepest charted contour is 30.5 meters, and the water within it is deeper.

• How big is Pelican Lake?

  Its surface covers 23.5 square kilometers and it holds 20 islands. Of its 101 kilometers of shoreline, 88 kilometers is the mainland shore and 13 kilometers is the shore of the islands.

• What fish are in Pelican Lake?

  Ontario’s aquatic resource records name eighteen 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 muskellunge.