Windy Lake

Where Windy Lake is

Windy Lake lies in the District of Sudbury, with shoreline in the City of Greater Sudbury.

How deep is Windy Lake?

The deepest mapped contour on Windy Lake is 54.9 meters, and the water within that boundary descends even farther. Ontario’s bathymetry record holds 31 depth contours for Windy 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.

Windy Lake has 8 Lake Partner monitoring sites. Five have reported phosphorus for the three or more years the province requires before a status is assigned. All are classified oligotrophic.

The longest record is held by site 5924/7 at SE Arm – Sudbury MOE WL4, with phosphorus sampled once a year over 11 years to 2025. Its long-term mean phosphorus concentration is 4.12 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 6 clarity readings at site 5924/7 give a median Secchi depth of 6.65 meters.

Median Secchi depth by year at site 5924/7

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

Windy Lake Weather

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

Windy Lake weather

Water temperature

Ontario’s aquatic resource records class Windy Lake as a cold-water lake, with a mean depth of 10.7 meters against its maximum of 54.9.

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 Windy Lake. The LastLake model computes the temperature of its surface water for each day from the daily mean air temperature at Environment Canada’s Sudbury A climate station, 50 kilometers from the lake, or the next nearest station when its record is incomplete, and from the lake’s area of 1,132 hectares and its mean depth of 10.7 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 Windy Lake carries the model’s figures for the past weeks and the coming week.

See also Lake Water Temperature in Ontario

Fish in Windy Lake

Ontario’s aquatic resource records name 15 fish species in Windy Lake. The province’s other records for the lake name one further species, northern pike. It appears in the records below.

Popular species in the province’s records

• Lake Trouttrout and whitefish
• Brook Trouttrout and whitefish
• Lake Whitefishtrout and whitefish
• Ciscotrout and whitefish
• Northern Pikepike
• Walleyeperch
• Yellow Perchperch
• Smallmouth Basssunfish
• Burbotcod
• Brown Bullheadcatfish

Spawning areas

Ontario maps 4 fish spawning records within the Windy Lake outline: 4 lake trout records of under 100 square meters each. Every record is recorded as verified and presently suitable, and none is classed as sensitive.

By number of records

By area mapped

• Lake Trout4 records100 m²

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 Windy Lake run from 1946 to 2005 and hold 27 releases. Walleye account for most of the fish: 1,391,000 released in seven of the years between 1946 and 2005. The last recorded release was 10,000 walleye fingerlings in 2005.

Eating the fish

The 2026 Guide to Eating Ontario Fish carries consumption advice for five species taken from Windy Lake, tested for contaminants at a sampling location in Cascaden & Dowling Twps., Sudbury 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 10

Windy Lake lies in Fisheries Management Zone 10. Ontario sets its fishing seasons and catch limits by zone.

Fisheries management zones around Windy 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

Windy Lake Ice Fishing

An ice hut on Windy 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). Windy Lake lies within FMZ 10.

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 10 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 Windy 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

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

Official names

Ontario’s geographic names register lists 9 official names on the water and its islands: 6 islands and one bay.

Bays 1

• Tower's Bay

Nearby lakes

• Vermilion Lake9 km away
• Fairbank Lake14 km away
• Agnew Lake34 km away
• Long Lake37 km away

All lakes

Questions about Windy Lake

• How deep is Windy Lake?

  Its deepest charted contour is 54.9 meters, and the water within it is deeper.

• How big is Windy Lake?

  Its surface covers 11.3 square kilometers and it holds 14 islands. Of its 41 kilometers of shoreline, 36 kilometers is the mainland shore and 5 kilometers is the shore of the islands.

• What fish are in Windy Lake?

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

• Is the water clear?

  All five monitoring sites with a phosphorus status are classified oligotrophic, the clearest of the province’s three bands.