Was up first on this target on the Fred Bear range and had a hard time seeing the whole target so I guessed which end was the front. Apparently I picked the wrong end of the target (left-most arrow in the tender spot) to aim at! I was wondering why the rest of my group (3 males) suddenly clutched themselves in pain... and it wasn't the first target that I did that too!
This was on the fun-range in a hunting blind. A short, maneuverable bow makes life a lot easier at TBoF, especially on the non-competetive fun-range where there's shots from hunting blinds and similarly cramped areas! I need to work out more though, my butt nearly engulfed some of those hunting stools!
There's nothing quite like shooting a traditional bow for relaxation, even in competetive settings and there's few thrills bigger than knowing that I nailed an animal from 25 yards in the 10 point kill zone with my trusty recurve. My performance wasn't exactly brilliant but it was a huge improvement over my very first TBoF shoot -- scored 275/600 on the main competition (8th out of 13), 35/100 on the coon shoot, and 2/10 on the wing-shoot. I'm glad I went to this shoot even with all the work sitting on me -- I got to see a lot of friends I hadn't seen in a while and made a few more friends in the archery world.
The coon shoot was a real hoot for me because I actually hit animals instead of trees, soil, or the lantern like I did the first time, where I had a perfect zero :) Basically, it's shooting small foam animals in the dark and aiming in the dark is a lot more difficult, but it's also a lot more rewarding when I hear that satisfying soft thud on the animal.
The wing-shoot was really interesting because it's basically a moving, aerial target. There's a catapult on a truck that launches a cardboard disk and then the archers shoot flu-flu arrows (huge, spiralled fletching) with blunt rubber tips (darn, wish my camera wasn't dead then!) It's a real test of instinctive shooting and I was able to hit two of them, which was pretty darned good for someone who had never done this before and was using arrows that weren't spined right! The thrill is beyond description -- that nice "thud" sounds great especially when there's also a flu-flu arrow and a disk falling down.
The competition itself was also an outright blast -- I may've not hit as many targets as I did in the previous two competitions, but it was still an impressive performance for me because I'm so used to completely clear/open lanes and in TBoF, there's lots of obstacles like trees, branches, palmettoes, and shrubs as well as not-so-comfortable spots to shoot from. It's easy enough to shoot when everything's open (assuming I judged distance right) but it's a real challenge to have to crouch down, kneel, or squat to get a decent shot, and there's an even larger element of instinct in trying to decide between the really safe butt/gut shot or the much riskier kill shot. There's an element of purification in traditional archery that's lacking in the compound and there's no real way to explain it -- the joy of traditional archery, especially in a 3-D or wing-shoot situation where it's purely instinctive, has to be experienced to really understand it.
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