​All,
 
Jake and I attended the Watershed Lake Association Summit last Thursday.  The slide deck they presented is attached.  Representatives from Lotus, Duck, Red Rock, Silver, Mitchell, Lucy were also there.
 
The big topic at the meeting was that watershed staff interns have gone around every lake by boat and did a shoreline assessment, assigning a numerical score to every individual lot on how it is landscaped for water quality based on criteria published by the DNR.  The example they used on slide #22 was Lake Riley. As you can see in slides 23-25, Lake Riley had the lowest average score of all the lakes evaluated.  They are still in the process of deciding how and when this information would be made public on their website.  Presenting the data at this meeting was part of that process.  Terry Jeffrey said several times that the motivation for this project was not to shame lakeshore residents, but to provide information and suggestions.  However, by rating each lot individually they made it personal.
 
Thanks,
 
Scott
 

Laurie Hable gets the win! Congratulations!

To those of you looking at the open water and wondering why I didn't call it several days ago, we've had a stubborn rim of ice all along our whole shore going out about 100 feet, from the park stretching almost all the way to the bay. I believe it was the first to freeze, and remained frozen during the thaws in December, so it was probably the thickest ice on the lake this year. To be honest about it, some ice remains from Richardsons to Adzicks, but it's being pummeled by the wind and breaking up quickly. It's one of the few times I'm grateful for a strong north wind!

This date ties the earliest ice-out date of March 8, 2000. Laurie Hable wins the pool by a mile - hers is the earliest guess, with the next guess by Josh Vogel for March 17th. Bob Adomaitis called the ice-in on January 15th - that's 53 days, folks. 53 days of ice on Lake Riley this year. Unbelievable.

Happy Spring, everyone!
Anne Florenzano