We have 79 years of Flashes on this website, comprising 667 issues and over 9,300 articles! It is a veritable treasure-trove of history, articles, member information, etc. And now - all of it is Searchable! Wanna go back and find an old article on a friend of yours? Or maybe the write-up on one of your escapades? Or who was that District Champion from 1998? Now you can!
Go to the Lightning Class website: www.lightningclass.org
- Select "The Class" on the top menu bar,
- Select "History Index" on the pull down menu.
- Select "eFlashes" on the landing page.
- Select the push button labeled "Searchable Flashes Index"
You can also jump directly to it via this link: (Maybe bookmark it?)
https://www.lightningclass.org/handlers/celinks.ashx?id=113472
Searches may be made by key word searching through article titles, a brief summary of each article, key words, key names, locations and fleets, and boat numbers.
The files may be searched by using CTRL-F or the search feature of your browser found on its menus. When using the Chrome or Edge browser, the index file links will attempt to take the user to the correct page of a Flashes issue via a Search. On cell phones or other browsers, the link will only open the correct issue of Flashes and users will need to scroll to the designated page.
This indexing project was executed by a group of Lightning Class Volunteers: Bob Shapiro, Raeyane Farrell, and Bob Astrove as a project of our "Lightning LOYALS" group.
For those interested in how we did this with 3 volunteers in under 4 months - we went high tech. We used Artificial Intelligence to process each of the 667 issues of Lightning Flashes through a query using ChatGPT. AI doesn't do a perfect job, and we encourage you to tell us about errors and omissions. At the same time, we think all will be quite impressed with how good a job it did. We can and will re-do pieces as issues are identified.
Enjoy. This was created so Lightning Sailors everywhere could have fun exploring the history of the Class.
Bob Astrove
Lightnings #11867 & #15603
ILCA V.P. for Classic Boats
Potomac River Fleet
astrove@hotmail.com