On Apr 29, 3:25 am, wrote:
Made it a whopping 16.5 nautical miles (30.5 kilometers) downwind from
the airport today.

Sorry C3, I've got you beat!

On my first flight in a wood glider, a K8 I had a 150 meter flight!

Due to a slight language problem, my German is not very good and the
flight instructors English, while better than my Deutsch, did'nt
convey the fact that I would need to slowly move the stick back from
the "finger on the panel" position at the beginning of the winch
launch! After a normal but extremely short ground roll the plane rose
into the air. Then of course the winch driver seeing that I was not
rotating into the proper position correctly reduced power to the
winch. At this point the parachute started to open as the plane
overflew the cable! I released, checked the airspeed whigh was fine
and landed short of the landing area. The instructor commented on my
reaction to the "out of nominal" launch. And that evening I bought him
a bier!

Oh yeah, 10 minutes later I was going up the winch launch normally and
got a 2 hour fun flight.

Bob