Are 25,000 spam comments normal for a month?

I’ve just joined wordpress and created my website touristmemoirs.com in June. And since then I’ve had about 25,000 spam…I’m sure this is too much or is this normal? It increased drastically from about 10 a day to 1000’s a day after I activated Askimet!
The spam is all in comment form as it is generally people talking about something completely unrelated to the post or it’s people being overly complimentary about my post but at the same time vague so you know it’s spam. I’ve set it to all comments need to be moderated but it’s very perplexing. Any ideas?