Yuma in March would seem to be an ideal place for a contest, but unfortunately the Pattern gods have their own ideas, so we ended up with temperatures 10-15 degrees hotter than normal for the few days of the contest. Oh well, better that than an ice storm. The Yuma contest was the first for the small, but very friendly Yuma Aeromodelers Club, and John Contreras and Dave Dehart did a great job putting the event together. 20 pilots showed up, but Dave decided that it was too much to fly and run the contest too, so he dropped out. The Yuma field is a very unique place to fly, because of what became to be known as the great migration, that happens every day around noon. The position of the sun is such, that pilots fly from the north side of the field in the morning, then pick up all their stuff and move across the runway and fly from the south side of the runway in the afternoon. It sounds like a pain in the rear, but really turned out to be no big deal. We were able to run through 4 rounds on Saturday with 2 flight lines and the usual stellar performance of the contestant judges. We then finished up the final 2 rounds on Sunday and were able to hand out the hardware and be on the road by noon. With the movement of a number of advanced flyers up to Masters class this year, it would seem that in the south, this should be the biggest class at most contests this year - Yuma was no exception with 6 pilots signed up and 1 more not flying that could have (Dave Dehart). It was the usual battle between Jerry Budd and Rusty Fried, with Rusty winning this round by a mere 3 points. John Contreras showed us he has been practicing the new sequence by taking third. In Intermediate, Noah Yaney and Dave Borrow continued their battle started in Phoenix and when the dust settled, Noah had prevailed once again - this time by only 9 points. I think those 2 are going to be at it all year - stay tuned. In Sportsman, Mike Greear continued his dominance with wins in all 6 rounds - is anyone going to challenge him this year? The advanced class was severely depleted with the upward movement this year, so it looks like a race between Bruce Brown and Jarvis Johnson. Bruce won again, but Jarvis had some bad luck and lost his plane to a wing failure on Saturday afternoon, so its back to the drawing board for JJ and Bruce walked away with wins in all 6 rounds. Finally, in FAI we only had 2 pilots - Troy Newman and Greg Frohreich. Both flew very well but Troy was on fire and won all 4 rounds on Saturday and couldn't make it back for Sunday because of car troubles. One final sad note - Jim Brown lost his new Pinnacle with a spectacular crash on Saturday morning - still don't know the cause, but we feel for Jim.