PRINCE ALBERT — What do you do when the lake you’re driving five hours to visit has no information online? If you’re Matthew Siemens, you build a website to fix it yourself.
The former Saskatoon resident, who now lives in Prince Albert, combined his love of the outdoors with his tech background to create an interactive map that compiles lake-related information — including yearly fish-stocking guides — to help anglers plan their seasons.
Before taking a long road trip to spend a weekend at a lake, Siemens often checked basic details such as access points and boat-launch conditions. However, he was surprised by how difficult it was to find even basic information. He used Google Maps to trace roads and determine where public access points might exist. As he searched, he discovered some roads were not accessible and that much of the information he needed was scattered across government and third-party sites in PDFs, CSVs and spreadsheets. The process was time-consuming and frustrating.
He told SaskToday he has been working on the project for a year and a half, and said it remains a work in progress as he updates it with stocking information for 2025, along with trends and comparisons from previous years.
To help the thousands of anglers facing the same challenge, Siemens turned that confusing collection of data into sasklakes.ca, a website that makes lake information easy to access. He began compiling various datasets, then integrated fish-stocking details, access points and other key facts. As the dataset expanded, he realized the tool could help far more people than himself.
“It's really a personal interest project. I like spending my time outside here in the province, exploring lakes. I found it pretty hard to get good information, even about some pretty large and popular lakes,” said Siemens.
“The government datasets are all over the place. But what happened was that the data was tricky to navigate: a PDF here, a CSV file there, and an Excel sheet somewhere else. So, for my own personal use, I started trying to pull it together so I could understand what the lake is, when it was last stocked, and how even to get there. As I was pulling all the information, it occurred to me that it would be better to have everything in one place for easy access. That is what I basically did, to make it easier to access all the data.”
He added that a centralized hub is especially important for the angling community, which closely follows fish-stocking updates from the Saskatchewan Wildlife Federation. Trout — one of the most popular stocked species — do not reproduce naturally in Saskatchewan, which is why restocking is essential. Anglers want to know whether their preferred lake or pond has been stocked before making the trip.
He noted that many popular trout lakes were not stocked this year and that wildfires in northern Saskatchewan also affected fishing access.
“Because of the fires, people could not get into some parks and lakes. So, certain fish ended up in other places, in different lakes,” he said.
Siemens worked for a decade in software in Saskatoon before taking a leave from his job. He eventually chose not to return and instead focused on building projects like sasklakes.ca. He now lives at the lake, dividing his time between exploring Saskatchewan and developing new tools. The work has since grown a following of more than 20,000 across Facebook and Instagram.
He said the project will continue to evolve as he expands beyond angling. Future additions will help people access campsites, hiking areas, paddling routes and swimming spots, including features to search parks across provincial, national and regional systems.
“Having fishing stock data is a large part of the user base. That's a portion of it, and I think what's happening is, as I go forward, the reason why the site and the Facebook group took off really well with the angling community was because that was where I had the most information to start with, like the fishing information was the easiest to find. Still, I'm really starting to see it grow with other people as well,” he said.
He added that the site now attracts paddlers, boaters, photographers, hikers and people looking for new places to explore.
“I'm excited to see where we can grow outside of that as well because there's something for everybody. There are a lot of cool lakes in Saskatchewan that you can swim, go paddling, or go hiking, even if you don’t have the equipment, if you don’t like to fish. You can go to a spot, have a sandwich and explore something new,” he said.
“As I started digging into it, there are many places that I've driven by my whole life that are just off the highway or down a little side road that were kind of a big surprise to me to learn there are places I never expected.”
