Hiya Wallace,

A few of us here at Memphis Soaring really enjoyed your winch. Unfortunately, it was only a few of us so the club decided to part with it. I hope the Philly club will get good use out of it.

Another advantage of the synthetic line is that we never once had a rope break during a launch (although we broke a ton of weak links in the early days.) The only time I'm aware of breaking the line was when it piled straight down on top of the winch and got wrapped around the works before we could stop the drum spining.

Hope to see you at a GTA event this spring,

To answer one of the original questions: the line was never a factor in any of my low releases. It falls cleanly away while you are still pushing the nose over. I've had to get off for various reasons several times below four or five hundred feet and never had a problem getting down safely. If you are too high to land straight ahead, you should have enough altitude to turn back, of course I know nothing about your home field, so YMMV.

Steve