On Aug 15, 2:23*pm, Bob Whelan wrote:
Are there folks winch launching from postage-stamp-sized-fields surrounded by
unlandable terrain using a beyond-the-boundary-winch?

The site where I converted to winch launching was like that. It's
"Jury Hill", at Greytown, near Wellington NZ.

There is a quite long north/south runway, but the interesting
conditions are often in westerly winds. The westerly runway starts
from the southern end of the main runway and at the time I was flying
there had a length of around 300 - 400 m. The winch run was something
like 1200 m with the remainder of the distance to the winch crossing a
mixture of swamp and low "sand dunes" (not actually sand, but
similarly lumpy). The cable retrieve vehicle used a not terribly
straight path through the lumps, including crossing a farm track and
one or two small streams.

With a glider with good brakes (e.g. Ka7, ASK13) and a bit of a
headwind (and you wouldn't use that runway unless there was too much
crosswind for the other one) you could land straight ahead from a
cable break at 200 or 250 ft and make some kind of circuit from 200 ft
or less, so there was always either one good option or else two
reasonable ones for the same runway, plus the option of simply turning
right 90 degrees onto the 1000+ m runway and land with a crosswind.