Archery…

Please see Part 1 and Part 2 of this saga..

On Thursday evening, after a thunderstorm in mid-late evening, I ventured to the club field in the hope that a hardy soul would turn up, I found that I was that hardy soul.

In the hope that someone would show up I assembled my bow, and centred the sight pin over the the arrow shaft…after double checking the centreshot. By 7.30 I guessed no-one was going to join me so I wandered home. I had planned to replace my 100gr pile in some of my arrows with 120 gr to see if there was any noticable effect.

The first act of this evening was to shoot my 660 Navs – all 4 (3 fletched, one bare) of them. The first two ends at 20yds saw me put them into a group of about 2″ diameter. I liked that, despite them being on the blue/red border. One of my newly fletched arrows now has two lines marked down the white fletches the groups were that tight. The bareshaft was within the group on both occasions.

The first two I shot with the match still in place in the button, I removed this and replaced it with the medium tensile spring and set this at midway down the scale. The group moved to the gold/blue border and a further adjustment put this in the middle. Over the next few ends I added a few of my 610 Navs and found that they joined the group, though slightly lower than the 660′s.

The button was locked down and a couple more ends were shot at 20yds before moving on to 40yds. At this distance there was a noticable difference in the positions the two sets impacted the boss, although both were within the gold.

From this it can be surmised that the two sets of arrows tune approximately the same, though the lighter piles do affect the sightmark – this is much more noticeable at greater distances.

I later moved on to 80yds shooting solely my 610 Navs, and found that for the first few ends my arrows fell central, albeit in a vertical line, but over time this spread somewhat. On one of the later ends I decided I’d shoot one of the 660 Navs to see what the difference in sightmark was. The arrow sailed over the boss, landing somewhere near the 110 yd mark. In one sense this was good news, in another not so much so, in that I can reach 100yds, however I may need to use lower spine arrows and lighter pile to do so. However, this information is of little use as the probability of me shooting 100yds this outdoor season is slim, other than ‘to see if I can’.

I have a competition on Sunday, a double Long national..

I hope to get a chance to shoot tomorrow…

There is still stuff to do as far as tuning my bow is concerned, I’ll update as it occurs..next week.

OW! it hurt…

Much of this afternoon was spent at the club. We held a ‘have a go’ session, 2 1/2 hours of shooting, with a cuppa and cakes thrown in, £10..what a bargain.

While others coached the have-a-goers, I settled down to fixing the 30 or so bent, defletched, broken-nocked and de-piled arrows we have because of the n00b courses. That took me all of about an hour.

I was then largely a spare part, but still got a cup of tea out of it

Once the tea break was over, I dropped a text to a mate who had agreed to meet up after the session to throw some arrows towards a boss. To be honest I wasn’t expecting him to come as he’d been up at daft o’clock to drive someone to catch a ferry. He replied confirming he was still intending to come over.

Between the time everyone left and he arrived I sat on a bench in the sun with my bottle of wa-wa and a copy of the Quicks catalogue. I quickly gave this up as a bad idea because I found myself thinking…”oooh that might be useful”. So I turned to repairing an arrow that had been defletched after I’d packed up my gear.

Having installed the first replacement fletch I wander outside to sit down again, to see my companion arrive.

As he has been out of it for a while, I was happy to shoot whatever he was comfortable with so let him decide the distance. He settled of 50yds and as one boss had been left out for us, I simply measured backwards from it to find the shooting line. The bow was set up, dragged back to the shooting line and we then commenced. It was then that I started feeling the effects of hunching over a fletching jig.

Long story short, we shot one detail, six arrows at a time, in my case with mixed results. As we were shooting into one of the n00b bosses – older, softer centres to make allowance for the lower poundage bows, if we didn’t hear the distinctive plop(ish), we could assme we’d got a gold or missed the boss entirely. Fortunately I didn’t miss, but once came quite close to doing so.

When we got to 5 dozen we both started tiring, this in turn was evidenced in the results we were getting. While I hadn’t shot very well, I was starting to see my arrows wandering a little.

One more dozen saw the end of shooting for the evening, six dozen in little over an hour is quite hard work. I don’t regret shooting, I do regret the pace.

That won’t stop me going back tomorrow morning though.

This morning arrived, I expected to peer out the window to see a wall of falling water and was pleased to not see one.

First port of call was the kitchen to make up some sandwiches. Part way through slopping mayo onto four slices I discovered that the crusts were furry…damn!

Had a bath, got dressed, loaded up the cooler with 4L of chilled water to which had been added some blackcurrant and apple squash & the bottle of water that had been put in the freezer overnight & a couple of 500ML bottles of Coke. However hot it would end up being, I was not going to run short of liquid.

Got into the car, switched on the Sat-Nav and away I went. About a mile from home the Sat-Nav hung. It wouldn’t return to menus, the power button did nothing. Fortunately once I got close to the venue I remembered the way there.

Unloaded, signed in, set up – I snagged a position directly under a conker tree – shade and/or shelter, and found my target. Then there was a 45 minute wait until assembly….mmm…TEA!

When shooting did begin, we started in overcast conditions, the shade of grey lightening and darkening from time to time. There was some wind, but nothing much compared to some of the times I’ve shot.

It always looks a lot further when I’m on a strange field…

The first 3 Dozen (60yds) took nearly 2 hours to complete. I really didn’t do very well. After moving the bosses to 50yds we took lunch. Well, they did, I drank apple squash.

The 3 Dozen at 50yds were better, but not by a huge amount. I was shooting better than I did two weeks ago, but not massively so.

The 3 Dozen at 40yds were a different matter, I picked up 250+ points here. Not brilliant, but not as bad as it could have been.

In the end, my score for the day was 648. Somewhere close to 100pts less than I scored four years ago when I won my 2nd place medal. This represents a 42 point increase on two weeks ago. So progress, not huge progress, but I’d have been foolish to expect to jump straight back in.

The cloud cover was variable all day, sometimes it was sunny, but more often than not it remained mostly/completely overcast. The predicted rain? Well, aside from one or two very brief and light showers, the last being about 18 arrows from the end of the shoot, it remained dry until (as I suggested to someone as we were collecting in the light rain) half way through the raffle even then it was short lived and.

I won nothing in the raffle, I never do. The only thing I have ever got out of post shoot raffles is an interesting coloured stain on my white trousers – I washed them with raffle tickets in the pocket.

All in all a fine day shooting. Pleasant company and a day *NOT* sitting around doing nothing.

Two to go, the first next Sunday..it’s Windsor. I can’t wait.