Dave Starck recently attended the Classic Boat Group workshop at the Finger Lakes Boating Museum in upstate NY. While there, he made the following presentation to a very deserving individual.

“I have the honor and privilege to present the 2024 Volunteer of the Year award. This LOYALS award recognizes outstanding volunteer contributions to the class, and this is the first year it is being awarded.

For many years, the recipient has been instrumental in helping to build community within the Lightning Class. They created and maintained, prodded and nurtured, the Classic Boat group. This is an online gathering place that has fostered a tremendous sense of community and resulted in many boats (and gear) changing hands, being restored and getting back out onto the water. And it will be a great feeder for the new GOT Flashes program.

But the Classic Boat group is not just virtual. The classic boat gathering at Keuka Lake in late June every year is going strong, 10 or 15 years in. And since 2023, the annual classic boat workshop created by this person has recanvassed decks, built tooling that helps manage raising masts, and this week is building rub rails and taking on other projects. All supplemented with a healthy dose of camaraderie and social activities.

When the LOYALS formed in 2024, this individual quickly became a part of the core group, raising his hand to provide ideas, to plan and to act. He has helped create the volunteer survey, called fleet captains and district commodores, researched the website Forum capability and created the first forum for fleet and district leaders. This person created great documentation to help people be successful joining and using the forum. And then researched Google Groups and set one up to facilitate communications amongst all the LOYALS.

This person researched the ability to use text messaging to communicate with our members. And created documentation to teach people how to sign up for text messaging. The result is we now send out texts to those signed up for it.

Currently this person is working on improving our class website, starting with an upgrade to the menus.

I am pleased to present the 2024 Volunteer of the Year award... to Bob Astrove!”