Hello, All,
I'm very happy to announce the inaugural use of our club's new winch this past weekend. We had a total of 37 launches and 36 were incident free. Our one, minor glitch was when a slack rope worked its way under one of our vertical rollers. This was fixed with a small, piece of high density plastic that fills in the gap where the rope became stuck. Overall, the weekend was a great success. Our winch was designed some 30-40 years ago, but has some very innovative features including an over spooling devise, a tensiometer and a rotating fairlead that keeps the rope mainly on a very large pulley rather than rollers. All our launches were with a 2-33 with a Schweizer CG hook and two people on board. The winch is powered by a Ford 351W engine pulling 3/16" Amsteel Blue and we were operating from a .7 mile grass strip. Our launch heights were 1000'-1100' with a maximum of 1300'. Due to the tensiometer we were easily able to fine tune our throttle settings from flight to flight. Moreover, it allowed for the quick and easy training of new winch drivers. If anyone is interested in more information about our winch or our winch operations, please feel free to contact me.

Dylan Caldwell,
Everglades Soaring Club, Inc.
SW Florida