Thursday, 23 October 2014

Aiming without aiming?

Ok so I went to the club on Sunday and tried out my old Winstar with the Tomcat limbs on it and it was fun.

The idea of instinctive shooting appeals to me and it is as far away from sighted target as you can get, with string/face walking and gaping you are still using a distance reference and adjusting to compensate for it. With instinctive the idea is to shoot at the target almost the same way you would throw a stone, with no conscious thought about adjusting for distance. This is not something that happens overnight, it is a case of shooting lots of arrows at a target and your body/brain should gradually learn where to aim.
 I recently had a chance to see some instinctive shooting at the club, our field archers asked if there is a way to have a classification system as there is in target so that they can gauge their progress. The solution that was put forwards is a set field course that will challenge even the most experienced archers and that we can setup again exactly the same any time we want to. A lot of thought went into how high a score would be needed for each classification and we needed as many archers shooing as many styles as possible to shoot the course to see if these were right. One the day I was shooing with my targeted recurve and just felt so out of my depth, each target is set at a different distance and height often partially obscured by leaves or long grass, all making it very hard to judge the distance. On most of the targets I was withing ten meters with my first guess and when my first arrow was high or low my second shot normally hit (usually not in the kill zone), but by the end of the round I was really feeling uncomfortable shooting  not knowing the distance. The three people I was shooting with were all shooting instinctive and all did much better than me.

Even though we have quite a few barebow archers at the club, I decided to just setup and see how I got on. So I set up a boss on the ten yard line over on the practice side of the field and had a go, just drew up focused on the gold and released....straight over the top of the boss, tired it again with the same results. OK so it looks like I need to aim a bit, or as it turns out find a sort of neutral position to start from. Once I worked that out I started putting nice groups of six arrows on the boss, well it was only ten yards and soon they were getting to close real arrow bashing stuff. So I pushed the boss out to twenty and then thirty yards, now things started to get a bit more interesting.

The first thing I noticed at the longer distance was that I kept looking for a sight or at least a reference point on my bow and had to really work  at just looking at the boss, the second was that as I relaxed and stopped looking for a reference my arrows started to group up again but as soon as I start to 'try' harder things went awry including arrows flying over the boss again. By the end of my little session my group was  moving in towards the gold almost of it's own accord. So not a bad start going to keep at it and see how I get on.

Friday, 3 October 2014

Back again

Hi all,

Sorry that I have not been very active over the last few months, had a few things going on and have been a bit huffy about some archery related stuff (not the shooting side of things).

So back to the blog. I have decided that it is time to actually give barebow a proper try so I was looking at risers. I could us my existing revo' but as it is the target version it has all the bits drilled out and is not legal for barebow, I a also going to use some thicker arrows and that is going to change the centre shot and as the bow is shooting so nicely I don't want to play with it. So what to do?

Well I could buy a barebow revo (yes yes do it do it!) which I would really like but I can't really spend much at the moment as my wife has given up work for a year to do her PGCE teacher training. So I have been looking at second hand stuff then I was sorting my office at home and came across my old KAP Winstar II riser and a pair of Kaya Tomcat carbon limbs (sounds like a starter kit to me), so I think I am going to get to the club on Sunday and see how they shoot together and go from there. The Tomcats are 34lb (6lb less than my EX-1s) so should be a bit easier to get used to a different anchor point.