Swimming at Dow’s Lake is now permitted in the first time in more than a century.
The inauguration of the Dow’s Lake recreational dock began with a splash on Thursday as politicians, National Capital Commission representatives and community members cannonballed into the water.
It was warm, warmer than the wind that left swimmers shivering after their collective dip.
Tobi Nussbaum, CEO for the NCC, was one of those swimmers. He told the Ottawa Citizen, while wearing a drenched watersuit, that he wanted swimming in the capital in the summer to be “what skating is in the winter.”
For many Ottawans, swimming in Dow’s Lake is unthinkable. Those feelings were played upon when Nussbaum joked about the parallels to Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, who jumped into the River Seine before the 2024 Olympic Games.
But Laura Reinsborough, Riverkeeper and CEO at Ottawa Riverkeeper, said Dow’s Lake and the Siene were incomparable. The Ottawa Riverkeeper is responsible for testing water quality in Dow’s Lake for the NCC, and for the entirety of this year it has passed with “flying colours,” she said.
In Ontario and Québec, levels of E. coli, a bacteria of concern that can cause infection and gastrointensional illnesses, must be under 200 per 100 millilitres of water to be considered safe for swimming, whereas in Europe the standard is 900.
“This is excellent, excellent water quality,” Reinsborough said. “And even after a significant rain event, when we’d expect in an urban area that conditions would deteriorate, Dow’s Lake is showing excellent water quality.”
The Ottawa Riverkeeper will continue to monitor Dow’s Lake water quality, five days a week.
It has been a decades-long wait for Dow’s Lake’s conditions to improve to meet swimming standards. Throughout that time there have been sweeping changes to area waterways.
Jennifer Halsall, the project lead on the Dow’s Lake dock project and a real-estate advisor for the NCC, said tests for contaminants in the waterways were coming back consistently good, to a point that contaminants were either “not picking up” or were “less than half of human health thresholds.”
Dow’s Lake’s history has also changed over the years and it is “very different from the Dow’s Lake we would have seen 100 years ago, or even 50 years ago,” Halsall said. For example, what is now Commissioner’s Park was once a lumber yard and the shoreline wrapping around the lake didn’t exist until 1958.
More green space and paying greater attention to water quality, as well as the circulation and depth of the water, also contribute to optimal swimming conditions.
Improvements and investment by the City of Ottawa to prevent sewage overflow have also helped, Reinsborough said.
“By and large, we really tried to thread the needle here to create ideal conditions in an ecosystem that is already ideal,” Halsall said, adding she planned to be at the dock everyday.
“We are so lucky to have the water we do in the (National Capital Region), whether it’s the Ottawa River, the Rideau, the lakes of Gatineau Park, the Gatineau River, Lac Leamy,” she said. “We really are a water capital, and it’s just so exciting to bring that here.”
For the swimming skeptics, Reinsborough and Halsall provided tips on when to know swimming would be safest. Avoiding waterways for 24-48 hours after a rainfall of more than 10 millimetres in a 24-hour should ensure any contamination from runoff has cleared.
Reinsborough also cited the website swimguide.org, which provides up-to-date data on swimming spots in the Ottawa River watershed. The NCC included a QR code in signage at the Dow’s Lake dock for quick access to water quality information.
Dow’s Lake remains an unsupervised swimming location with a deep water entry and no shallow end, so Nussbaum said its use should be reserved for experienced swimmers only. Beginners should start in areas with shallow areas, such as Westboro Beach or the NCC River House.
Bob Rinfret, an area resident, said he had previously gone swimming nearly every place you could imagine in the region, but never before in Dow’s Lake.
“It was very disturbing for most of my life thinking that we had three rivers running through this area, if you include the Gatineau River, and then I did not feel comfortable jumping in for a swim in any of them,” Rinfret said.
“Times have certainly changed.”
The recreational dock pilot project at Dow’s Lake will run for a year. The NCC will be looking for comments from the community while it’s in place.
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