by Mike Carey, June 05, 2006

Milestones - defined as "a significant point in development". It seems we’ve been having a few of them here on WashingtonLakes.com. Every month Aaron and I check the visit statistics and compare to last year, a new record number of visits is registered. It’s a trend that has been going on for about as long as the web site has been running. But recently we marked a special milestone worth mentioning.

Ten thousand reports posted. Unbelievable! Our lucky poster was Says, a bass angler that has been posting frequently the past couple of years. It was fitting to have a regular post number 10,000. Of course, each report before that counted just as much to reach that magical number. And, it is just a number, isn’t it?

How about this one - over 500 reports posted in the month of May. I remember back when 500 reports were posted in the entire year! Just goes to show how the growth of this site has been going. I do believe we have a bit of momentum here.

So what’s it mean to the average fisherman logging on to WL.com? A couple things. First, we are now getting a steady stream of fresh reports which gives us more information to decide where we want to spend our precious gas money (and time) to go to. Second, with more reports there is less worry of "over-exposing" a particular lake. I remember last year having that concern about little Joy lake in King county. But after visiting there, I realized some lakes will limit their own pressure just by the size and access to the lake (if you’ve gone to Joy you’ll know what I mean).

I don’t have a crystal ball and am not foolish enough to predict where we will be ten years from now. But it is fun to speculate. How about 10,000 reports every year? Now that would be something, wouldn’t it? Stick around and maybe we can make it happen!