Lake Wolsey

Where Lake Wolsey is

Lake Wolsey lies in the District of Manitoulin, with shoreline in the Municipality of Gordon / Barrie Island and the Township of Burpee and Mills.

How deep is Lake Wolsey?

Lake Wolsey reaches a maximum recorded depth of 25.1 meters, determined from 47,571 soundings.

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.

Lake Wolsey has 13 Lake Partner monitoring sites. Eight have reported phosphorus for the three or more years the province requires before a status is assigned. Five of those sites are classified oligotrophic and three mesotrophic.

The longest record is held by site 6883/4 at Sein-SP4, S-central Reference, with phosphorus sampled once a year over 5 years to 2018. Its long-term mean phosphorus concentration is 7.6 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.

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

Lake Wolsey Weather

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

Lake Wolsey weather

Water temperature

No provincial monitoring station records water temperature on Lake Wolsey. The LastLake model computes the temperature of its surface water for each day from the daily mean air temperature at Environment Canada’s Gore Bay-Manitoulin climate station, 8 kilometers from the lake, or the next nearest station when its record is incomplete, and from the lake’s area of 2,290 hectares and its mean depth. The province’s records give no mean depth for Lake Wolsey; the model uses 7.7 meters, estimated from its deepest mapped contour.

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

See also Lake Water Temperature in Ontario

Fish in Lake Wolsey

Ontario’s aquatic resource records list no species for Lake Wolsey. The province’s other records for the lake name two species, northern pike and rainbow trout. They appear in the records below.

Popular species in the province’s records

• Rainbow Trouttrout and whitefish
• Northern Pikepike

Spawning areas

Ontario maps 3 fish spawning records within the Lake Wolsey outline, for two different species, and all of them are mapped below.

By number of records

By area mapped

• Northern Pike2 areas2.1 ha
• Rainbow Trout nursery1 area1.4 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.

Fisheries Management Zone 14

Lake Wolsey lies in Fisheries Management Zone 14. Ontario sets its fishing seasons and catch limits by zone.

Fisheries management zones around Lake Wolsey

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

Lake Wolsey Ice Fishing

An ice hut on Lake Wolsey must be removed by March 15. 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). Lake Wolsey lies within FMZ 14.

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 14 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 Lake Wolsey 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

Nearby lakes

• Lake Kagawong17 km away
• Mindemoya Lake27 km away
• Lake Manitou42 km away
• Lauzon Lake48 km away

All lakes

Questions about Lake Wolsey

• How deep is Lake Wolsey?

  Its maximum recorded depth is 25.1 meters.

• How big is Lake Wolsey?

  Its surface covers 22.9 square kilometers, with 25 kilometers of shoreline.