On Saturday, February 6, 2016 at 7:57:42 PM UTC+3, John Cochrane wrote:
His technique is to stay a bit off to one side, high if possible, and make sure the glider is banked toward to towplane with nose low and pointing towards the towplane as the slack comes out.

That's largely what I do.

I think the key is that if you're getting slack rope developing it's because you're going faster than the towplane.

The amount of slack that develops is the integral (sorry) of your excess speed and the amount of time you have the excess speed.

I don't like to throw away energy by slipping or using the brakes. It should be a very rare thing indeed.

Much better to store the energy by climbing. You can then get most of the speed back by descending, lessening the jolt as the rope comes tight.

The sooner you start to climb the less slack accumulates.

It doesn't matter how high you are above the tow plane as long as the rope is slack. So you've got 150 ft of altitude above the towplane and 150 ft below the towplane to play with. That's a lot.

Also 150 feet to the side. Most people seem to forget this. You can bring out the slack when *you* want to by flying out to the side, and turning back as it's about to come tight. And with no risk whatsoever of a tug upset. If you get the slack out while you're out to the side, turning back into the middle gives you more more rope. It means that you can have no jolt even if you're going considerably slower than the towplane at that point.

So, yes, a combination of higher (to store energy that you can turn back into speed) and to one side (for visibility, to take out the slack early, and to "put back" a controlled amount of slack as needed to eliminate the jolt..

Both descending and coming back from the side help you to match speeds.

The big big key is to concentrate on controlling the amount of bowing in the rope and the trend in the amount of bowing, not at the actual speeds and positions.

In the same way that you don't try to calculate the distance to a ridge you want to cross and your height above it, but just look at how the angle is changing and if you can see more or less stuff beyond the ridge as you get closer.