Wabigoon Lake

Where Wabigoon Lake is

Wabigoon Lake lies in the District of Kenora, with shoreline in the City of Dryden.

How deep is Wabigoon Lake?

The deepest mapped contour on Wabigoon Lake is 15.0 meters, and the water within that boundary descends even farther. Ontario’s bathymetry record holds 3,699 depth contours for Wabigoon 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.

Wabigoon Lake has 3 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 eutrophic.

The longest record is held by site 5689/3 at Pronger's Pt., with phosphorus sampled once a year over 4 years to 2024. Its long-term mean phosphorus concentration is 23.32 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 1 clarity readings at site 5689/3 give a median Secchi depth of 1.5 meters.

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

Wabigoon Lake Weather

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

Wabigoon Lake weather

Water temperature

Ontario’s aquatic resource records class Wabigoon 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 Wabigoon Lake. The LastLake model computes the temperature of its surface water for each day from the daily mean air temperature at Environment Canada’s Rawson Lake climate station, 71 kilometers from the lake, or the next nearest station when its record is incomplete, and from the lake’s area of 10,278 hectares and its mean depth. The province’s records give no mean depth for Wabigoon Lake; the model uses 4.5 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 Wabigoon Lake carries the model’s figures for the past weeks and the coming week.

See also Lake Water Temperature in Ontario

Fish in Wabigoon Lake

Ontario’s aquatic resource records name 18 fish species in Wabigoon Lake. The province’s other records for the lake name three further species. They appear in the records below.

Popular species in the province’s records

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

Spawning areas

Ontario maps 248 fish spawning records within the Wabigoon Lake outline, for four different species, and all of them are mapped below.

By number of records

By area mapped

• Northern Pike114 areas399.0 ha
• Muskellunge114 areas399.0 ha
• Walleye17 areas8.8 ha
• Walleye nursery2 areas32.8 ha
• Lake Whitefish1 area0.1 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 Wabigoon Lake run from 1947 to 1954 and hold 9 releases. Walleye account for most of the fish: 5,000,000 released in six of the years between 1947 and 1954. The last recorded release was 750,000 walleye eggs in 1954.

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

Eating the fish

The 2026 Guide to Eating Ontario Fish carries consumption advice for twelve species taken from Wabigoon 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 5

Wabigoon Lake lies in Fisheries Management Zone 5. Ontario sets its fishing seasons and catch limits by zone.

Fisheries management zones around Wabigoon 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

Islands and names

Wabigoon Lake contains 238 islands in the Ontario Hydro Network’s outline, ten of them over 10 hectares and 105 under a tenth of a hectare.

Official names

Ontario’s geographic names register lists 30 official names on the water and its islands: 15 islands, nine bays, one narrows and three points on islands. A further 8 named points stand on the mainland shore.

Bays 9

• Barrit Bay
• Bonny Bay
• Contact Bay
• Daunais Bay
• Elm Bay
• Kelpyn Bay
• Larson Bay
• Mud Bay
• Muskie Bay

Harbours, cuts and narrows 1

• The Narrows

Points on the shore 8

• Alto's Point
• Bowen Point
• Bruce Point
• Clay Banks
• Indian Point
• McGraw's Point
• Soapstone Point
• Wood's Point

Nearby lakes

• Thunder Lake8 km away
• Dinorwic Lake16 km away
• Eagle Lake35 km away
• Minnitaki Lake64 km away

All lakes

Questions about Wabigoon Lake

• How deep is Wabigoon Lake?

  Its deepest charted contour is 15 meters, and the water within it is deeper.

• How big is Wabigoon Lake?

  Its surface covers 102.9 square kilometers and it holds 238 islands. Of its 317 kilometers of shoreline, 204 kilometers is the mainland shore and 113 kilometers is the shore of the islands.

• What fish are in Wabigoon Lake?

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

• Is the water clear?

  All two monitoring sites with a phosphorus status are classified eutrophic, the most nutrient-rich of the province’s three bands.