Something has to give....

Hi all,

Here we are again at the beginning of another season and I have come to the sad conclusion that I am going to have to stop shooting bare bow for as long as I am captaining our summer league team. I just cannot shoot two different styles well and as I have made a commitment to the league team that will have to take precedence over my bare bow aspirations.  

 I know there are lots of people who shoot more than one style but how many of them can honestly say they are shooting both as well as the could, I was finding myself using the corner of my mouth, where I anchor for bare bow when I was shooting target when I should be under my jaw. I am going to shoot bare bow but it is going to have to wait until I can either pass on the summer league hat or until the team is at a point where my score is not so important, so I have  anew goal....get the summer league team up to scratch.

We have a problem with target archery at Noak Hill that I think I have mentioned before, unfortunatly it is also one of our greatest assets, we have our own record status ground that we can use from an hour after dawn till and hour before dusk 365 days of the year. "Big problem!" I hear you all shout, we should try only having a field for one or two day a week, when everyone wants to shoot at the same time and there is our catch 22. Because we can use the club at any time people are not tied shooting at set times and so they come whenever the can/want to. I see other clubs in the area with a busy shooting line with 20 or 30 people on a Sunday morning and then I look at us with  five or six archers on the line, the difference is that there will be the same number almost everyday of the week and field big enough for two independent shooing areas with a safety line in the middle we don't all have to shoot at the same time, which again splits us up. This is not a huge problem for established members as they tend to come over in the same group on the same day. For beginners it can be more of a problem as once they have finished their course passed their assessment and paid their membership they are left to their own devises, don't get me wrong we have lots of people ho are more than willing to give help and advice. But with on set shooting schedule they do tend to end up just shooting at a boss with no real aim other than shooting.

So we are going to try and get back to a regular Sunday shoot, using rounds that have several options for distance we will be able to accommodate anyone who wants to shoot and  start giving some direction to their shooting. The initial aim will be for archers to work up through their classifications and we will also have the odd week when we do not shoot a round but just spend the time working on good shooting maybe by pairing up a novice/improving archer with a more experience archer. I am also playing about with the idea of a sort of informal mentor type set up where each new member will have a go to person who will help them with their progression, this will I hope stop the old problem of being told six different thing by six different people. It will also mean that if you see a novice doing something not quite right you can tell their mentor and then they can deal with it with them.

So that is where I am going this season hopfuly I will be able to report back on good progress as we go forwards, but time will tell.

 

Stuff

Sorry for the lack of posts I just have some stuff going on (just normal stuff not any kind of exciting or scandalous type stuff) and archery is kinda taking a back seat, but the summer league is coming up so hopefully that will get me back in the game. (It better I am our clubs team captain).

Keep the comments coming and if you have any suggestion for thing you would like to see let me know. 

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.

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.

Taking a break.............

Well just a quick note to let you know that I will be away for a bit, the last few weeks we have been getting ready for a cruise on the Queen Mary II following the coast of Norway right up into the arctic circle. It is a fifteen day trip and should be lots of fun but it has been taking up a bit of my time sorting out luggage clothing and the like.
We have another league match on the 3rd of August 2 days before we go and I will try and do a quick update on how that goes.

Wait? No bare bow weight .......no

Well got the bare bow weight fitted, it shot with it, hated it nuf' said .....well not really so watch this space for a longer explanation.......ha! I bet that will keep you on the edge of your seat!

How do you like it.........?

Just a few thought s today, I was thinking about last Wednesday when I was last at the club. There were a few things going on with my bow that I have mentioned, but I didn't really say much about the truly awful round I shot, so here goes.

Now most of you will know that I don't shoot with a clicker and my reasons for this, but if not then briefly it is just that I feel the more aids you use on a bow the farther away you get from the shot, I think that makes sense. I often talk about how alive or dead a bow is, in an effort to describe how they feel when shot.

One extreme would be a one piece wooden bow with no stabalisaton or dampening of any kind, which will move with every twitch of your arm or gust of wind and in turn transmit back to your bow hand every vibration when shot and will feel "alive".
 Of course the other extreme would be a target recurve bow with a long rod, v-bars and limb savers This bow will have a lot of inertia from the weights on the long rod and v-bars and so will resist any movement to the extent that it will actually hold your bow arm still. There may also quite a lot a dampening from the long rod and some from of limb savers. This will all add up to a bow that will weight a lot more but will be much more stable and will feel "dead".
 To be honest if you are going for the highest score and to be as consistent as possible you want the latter, it will let you hold the pin steady on the gold and coupled with a clicker enable you to shoot as well as you possibly can. If (and it's big one) you have good form and a well executed shot cycle, because no matter how good and well tuned your setup is, you are still the one who has to make the shot and each subsequent shot the same as the last.
But for me, I prefer the former, I like to feel that I am making the shot, not just providing the power for a well engineered machine. I will not get the same level of consistency, my bow is less stable and no matter how much I practice, my draw will vary. Maybe by only a few millimeters 90% of the time, but it is the other 10% (where a clicker would let me know that I have not reached full draw or that I had pulled too far) that will probably keep me from getting my bowman classification ( I am going to try for it next season). I do use a long
I am not knocking people who shoot with aids and not preaching that you should shoot without, you shoot the way that you enjoy in order to reach the goals that you have set yourself.

Wow gonna need to make another post the cover the original topic which was "Have you ever had one of those days?".