Finally Finished!

Along with building arrows on my own, I've spent the last few months (going one step a week) building arrows with a friend of mine and finally finished them last night. I also got my paws on a nice back-quiver after near-embarassing accidents with hip quivers and loose pants. The only problems I'm having with the back-quiver are that it's a bit hard to reach back there and pull the arrow out in a nice graceful motion or put the arrow back in a graceful motion. It is worth it though -- I like having the extra bit of mobility and not having to worry about my pants dropping by accident when I stick my heavy traditional arrows into my quiver!

And now time for me to go back to working on homework so I can spend some quality time with the non-academic love of my life on the range tomorrow after plant ecology seminar... I've got a special engagement with my sweetie the weekend after this one, assuming academic duties don't over-ride my plans for shooting at the Traditional Bowhunters of Florida shoot!

Day 1 With the Sword Scope...

I started sighting in the sight that I got at the shoot yesterday and let's just say I forgot how difficult it can be to get it sighted in compared to my field scope! On the other hand, the effort was well worth it and it's great because I don't have to remember to adjust the scope if I'm shooting within a certain range (20-50 yards the way I configured it) but it's also hard when the pins all look like they're on top of each other. The fibers are especially bright, which is a huge plus in poor light conditions, but they also make it a bit more of a challenge to aim. I really like this sight a lot better than the ultra-basic fixed-pin sight even if trying to make adjustments is a bit more challenging because of the long fibers. Of course, though, for 3-D I still have a serious bias towards my trusty recurve!

Forest Archers Shoot

It was an absolute blast even if my score was pretty low compared to the really hard-core shooters -- 178/400. I missed a few "gimmies" when I realized that the nock-set on my bow had gotten loose at the end of the morning round and I was getting really erratic errow flight. Some fellow traditionals helped me get the nock-set back into place and get good flight back, although it took me a few shots to re-adjust. It was still a real blast -- only missed 30% of the time and I was even getting some 8's and 10's! I did have a lot of arrows ricochet though, especially on this one alligator target in the afternoon round where all four of us in the group were having trouble getting arrows to stick on the alligator... and there was a deer target that my arrow should've penetrated but instead bounced off and ricocheted most spectacularly into the grass behind the target. It was by far the best and we made several attempts to re-create it, but to no avail. The smart thing: aim for the nose. What we did: aim for the kill zone on the back. Unfortunately, I didn't have my camera with me so I didn't get pictures :( But I did get pictures of the stuff I won in the raffle once I got home... The biggest prize was the Sword fixed-pin sight, which I actually bartered for with someone who wanted a stabilizer component that I had originally one but ended up with the sight, so we swapped.

All in all, it was a great shoot, even if my score was borderline embarassing compared to the legendary traditional figures who showed up... but it's a personal best in terms of the rate at which I hit the target! I can't wait for the Traditional Bowhunters of Florida shoot in 2 weeks, assuming one of my profs doesn't decide to put in a field trip for that weekend! It was also a huge blast being able to see friends from both the compound and traditional side of shooting -- I feel a whole lot more comfortable around my fellow shooters and wilderness-types than the overly refined bar/club-hopping peers I'm surrounded by at school.

I Want A Barf Bucket Or At Least a 700 nm Filter For My Glasses

I tend not to remember most holidays until they hit me right in the nose or the eyes. Valentine's Day was no exception -- it took me a while to realize why there was so much abuse of pink, white, and red as well as rather tasteless images of hearts and almost-naked winged babies (eeewww!!!) I can live with the red and white, having gone to a high school whose school colors were just that. Plus red and white are a pretty good combination for fletching colors if I want to find my arrows again. For some reason, I get really nauseous when I see all the Valentine's Day stuff all over the place, including around the nice little forest corridors I like to hide in when I get fed up with being around too many people and being indoors for too long but can't quite leave campus because of some academic commitment or another. When I saw all that tasteless stuff all over campus, there were three possible courses of action that ran through my mind: 1) run into the bathroom to purge the ickiness out of my system before proceeding 2) bolt into my office 3) hide in my apartment. I ended up with taking the 3rd one -- the 1st one wasn't going to make me any more productive, the 2nd one was tempting until I realized that my office-mates were enthusiastic about it and I'd get very little work done because I have an office-mate who's struggling with Python programming and linear algebra, so I opted to just hide at home to get work done. Plus I figure my office-mates won't exactly enjoy the conditions that help to write: blasting music, frequent pacing, and acting a lot like Gollum/Smeagol.

And when I got a bit too saturated from work, I spent a bit of quality time with my trusty Chek-Mate recurve at Gator Bowmen. I'm back to working on my thesis proposal with several papers on evapotranspiration and carbon flux modelling, a few papers on artifical neural networks, and several pieces of scratch paper to sketch my conceptual model with. And my Chek-Mate is sitting next to me. I love shooting my compound and I can shoot extremely well with it, but the Chek-Mate is my non-academic love! I'll take a good, reliable bow any day over a human... In fact here's a top 10 list of why a bow is better than a human, in no particular order:

-- Bows are perfectly content watching me study or write proposals
-- They're extremely honest about me (ie, if my form is off, it WILL tell me!)
-- They don't call me during class and wonder why I don't ever pick up the phone
-- They understand the concept of "do not disturb"
-- It's much easier to really get to know the bow really well (ie, no need to go on lengthy dates that interfere with studying when a good test-shoot will suffice)
-- Bows share my taste in the kind of place I want to live in (ie, not in a *.* big city)
-- Bows don't have random baggage to give me grief
-- Bows transport very well
-- Bows don't try to get me to go to annoying/useless social functions
-- Bows don't try to interfere with my ambitions by wanting to start a family with me

If I Could Do This More Consistently...

Not bad for someone who hasn't been practicing nearly enough... and this was, of course, from my Bowtech Equalizer. The top one was a 30-yard field target and the middle one was a 48-yard hunter target.

Burn, Baby, Burn!

I got to go to a real controlled burn yesterday with my Ecosystems of Florida class and did my little fire ecology experiment. I was looking at how much trees (slash pines, Pinus eliottii) were utilized as fire escape routes for bugs and other small animals as a function of saw palmetto (Serenoa repens) cover. Basically saw palmetto, besides being not fun to hold by the stalks and providing some awful tasting emergency food, makes for great fires and might be an un-incentive for little critters to go underground, but at the same time, maybe can also make going up trees a lot more dangerous and actually encourage more critters to go underground. So my way of testing this was wrapping the tree's cicrumference about 3 meter above the ground (as high as I can safely reach with the ladder) and manipulating palmetto cover by hacking it up and dumping the hacked up bits elsewhere so I'd have full cover, half cover, and no cover within a 1 meter radius. I had 6 replicates of 3 treatments and my gut-instinct conclusion is: put the duct tape much higher up the tree, although I did catch a few bugs, but the real prize was a little common anole. Most of my tapes were either severely melted, or in two of my replicates, completely burned away. I might post my results after doing a real analysis :)

And I Dub Thee... Lizardbane

I did it again -- killed a lizard at the range again. This time it was from 10 yards and for some reason I thought it was a really green leaf or some random detritus that someone had placed on the target face. I took a shot at it and it started twitching so I knew it wasn't what I thought it was. I decided to put it out of its misery by taking a few more shots at it knowing that at 10 yards, my accuracy is pretty darned good. The second shot already finished it off but I figure I might as well finish my accuracy/precision drill. I felt a strange sense of pride in being able to make that kill once I realized what it was -- in terms of scaling, if I can get that kind of accuracy on a lizard, imagine what I can do with a deer or a hog!

What made this even more interesting was that this happened while I was testing a theory someone had about why my aim was so off with my trusty Chek-Mate recurve even if the flight looked pretty good, namely that I was way underspined with that batch of arrows. So I had taken my longbow and my 30 lb Martin X-200 (aka the Little One even if it is longer than my Chek-Mate) to do a bit of a comparison to see which bow my last batch of arrows fit. Without a doubt, I had much better results with the Martin X-200, which I semi-expected because I'm only getting 20-25 lbs out of it with my piddly 25" draw, although for that little draw weight, it sure sends those heavy arrows flying pretty well out to 35-40 yards. I had the same leftwards bias with the longbow as I did with my Chek-Mate recurve, while I generally hit where I aimed (give or take a bit of a stochastic error function) with the X-200 with this batch of arrows.

100th Post!

Well, looks like I've reached the 100th post finally! Basically the link is of good, inspiring guitar playing that a friend of mine sent to me after he got a full blast of me ranting and raving about my research proposal, experimental design involving a controlled burn, and being stressed over not having enough time to roam about and shoot.

Not much else going on here although I'm realizing that experimental designing in ecology can be quite the challenge! I wanted to measure the use of trees as an escape route for a low-intensity fire (as is typical of slash pine forest) based on the quantity of flammable materials (ie, saw palmettoes) near the tree. After I presented this idea to my FL ecosystems prof, we must've spent a good half hour going over the pitfalls of the various possibilities in sampling schemes, logistical issues, and statistical analyses. All this for a simple experiment in catching bugs during a fire! I'm looking forward to taking out my frustration on the saw palmettoes though and watching things burn -- the lack of archery time does have an interesting effect on me of late.

Writing update: I now have a bit of an "out-take" section that'll probably grow soon. You can reach it at http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~greywolf/out-takes

I might also do another writing FAQ soon -- I've been getting a lot of verbal questions of late!