Lucky Bare Shaft

29.5" 2016 Easton XX78 Super-Slam shaft, 125 grain point. It flew insanely well that time too. Now if I could only do this consistently, even if it was only from 16-17 yards!

Practice at Bear Archery

So there's another spot I have at my disposal for archery practice. It's the little range by the Bear Archery factory just west of I-75. This place is within jogging distance for me, although biking or jogging with archery equipment is miserable to say the very least. I prefer Gator Bowmen though because it's a lot quieter and I don't hear so much traffic noise, plus there's something a lot more appealing about practicing in a hardwood forest than by a bunch of warehouses!

Again, click on the link for some pictures from my camera. I think I'm a bit of a rebel for being the one person in the group who's likely to hunt and shoots something other than a pure-bred longbow!

Return of the Equalizer

I finally made enough time to shoot a half-field round. My score was pretty embarrassing (245/280... including a target where I only got 10/20 points and another target where I had a 15/20) but heck, I did pretty well for not having shot any field since the end of July! I seem to be asymptoting around 255/280 on half-fields and around 510/560 on a full field. I know what I need to do to get past this but I've also committed myself to getting the Piled High and Deeper degree and unlike a BS degree, won't get themselves done without me making a huge sacrifice to appease the gods of academia. Of course, this is so I can open up more time for myself in the long run to spend more time outdoors ;)

After shooting purely traditional for a long time, the Equalizer does feel incredibly heavy and the combination of the back-tension release, let-off, and looking through a peep sight and a field scope is extremely trippy!

Caught in the Act

I like lizards despite the fact that I'll probably end up in lizard hell for shooting so many of them. I also like to test my hand-eye coordination and try to catch them so I can get a closer look at them. It so happened that I was falling asleep in my office from lack of circulation to my brain from spending too much time in R. I was out by the Reitz Union and saw a number of cute little brown anoles. My natural instinct is to try to catch them so I tried to catch one and just as I missed it (would've caught it but apparently someone caught it at least once before judging by its stumpy little tail), one of my fellow foresters sees me and asks what I'm doing. I think my lizard-catching skills are much better in the winter than in the fall, but then again, maybe it has something to do with the fact that they're ectothermic and I'm endothermic :)

And now back to the regularly scheduled program of staring at R. Or maybe just pacing up and down the stairs another 4-5 times until the botany seminar. What I really want to do now though are a subset the following:

1) Jog a few miles on the treadmill
2) Shoot a full-blown (28 target) field or 900 round with the Equalizer
3) Shoot a 300 or 3D with Sparrowhawk but with broadheads
4) Shoot an IKAC or 3D with Sorondil-Telcontar
5) Experiment with the Equalizer using more of a huntin' setup than me spot-shootin' setup
6) Go raptor or lizard watching

Adventures in Methods of Ecosystem Ecology

How many grad students does it take to get through 100 meters of dense understory in a longleaf pine (Pinus palustris) forest that hasn't been burned in 25 years? I'll let you ponder over the answer for a bit. In case you haven't figured it out, click on the title of the post to see the pictures.

In other news, I've been tinkering around with my longbow and a recurve that a friend of mine loaned me. The longbow, the take-down from Four Winds that I have now dubbed "Sparrowhawk" (in honor of Ged, whose use-name was Sparrowhawk, from the Earthsea series and in reference to a few of my quirks), behaved a whole lot better today after I did something I usually don't like to do. I raised the brace-height from 6.75 inches (which is a bit higher than I usually like on a longbow) to 7.25 inches (which is about where I set my recurve to... that's a really good recurve brace-height for me!) and even though I lost some speed, I certainly was able to get some more consistent arrow flight. I usually don't like to give up too much speed because my draw length is so painfully short, but if it makes my bow a lot easier to control and place a better shot, losing a few feet per second may not suck so much.

I like Sparrowhawk better than the River's Edge recurve, although there is a lot more of a battle of wills between me and Sparrowhawk. The River's Edge bow is certainly very well-engineered with its static limb-tips and is one of the few deflexed riser bows that I can actually shoot reasonably well with. For only getting about 40 lbs at my draw length, it puts a pretty nice zip and isn't as picky about what goes through it, although it certainly has its preferences in arrows... It's a much gentler bow and a lot easier to transport, but I still have my biases towards the much more aggressive Sparrowhawk (Phoenix 3-piece T/D longbow built by Lester Pynne, who lives about an hour's drive from me) and the zippy but mellow little Sorondil-Telcontar :)

Making Some Progress...

I did a bit more test-shooting with different arrows. The black and white fletchings are my 28" 1916 shafts with 100 grain points, which flew a lot better than they did with the 125 points. The yellow fletchings are my friend's 29.5" 2016 shafts with 100 grain points. Those flew perfectly and the only reason I even saw them in flight was because of the fletching. I also got a bit of broadhead training so I feel a lot better about shooting them now too. All I need to do now is to either cut my 1916s by about half an inch or get 29" 2016 shafts to use 125 grain broadheads or 29.5" 2016 shafts with the 100 grain broadheads.

I can't wait to actually hunt!

Random Data

The chronograph kindly provided the following speeds for me on the take-down:
4-fletched 28" cedar arrows: 145 fps (some insist that I'm getting more like 155-160 fps)
3-fletched 28" 1916 arrows: 167 fps (again, there's dispute that this figure should be closer to 175-180)

All I know that this one shoots with a much flatter trajectory than Sorondil-Telcontar. I still haven't named this one. I think a name will form once I bond with it some more.,

Seminar Brain Fart

So I was drifting between reality and fantasy during the weekly SNRE seminar, which was surprisingly good for a non-biophysical or simulation modelling talk. I realized why they call the coffee concoction I took as a precaution "Eye Opener". It's not so much of true mental alertness as the agony of a full bladder about 15 minutes into the darned 50 minute torture session and not being able to leave in case something I have to write down comes up (ie, attendance sheet and speaker evaluation forms). Just imagine, a 600 mL capacity bladder is at 595 mL and they're still in the middle of the talk... then in a need to remove more water from the bloodstream, the bladder grows to inhuman sizes and the sensation of my internal organs floating in a solution of urea, followed gradually by my eyeballs being submerged in that yellow solution. And then just as explosion seems to be inevitable, I either bolt out the door to the nearest water closet during the lengthy Q&A session or the session finally finishes completely and I can finally escape without doing the sprint of embarrassment.

I think I'm going to stick with something a bit less powerful than "Eye Opener" unless it's a known snoozer topic for me that I actually have to be awake for. Only one more semester of these weekly torture sessions!

Cool Shot of the Day and Forestry Orientation Group

Whew, I have a serious gut in this picture! I think I need to spend more time jogging and working out than staring at the computer... either that or learn to live on more fiber and less meat.

If this had been a hunting situation, a pass-through there would be ideal to hasten the bleeding. Of course though, this spot has been rendered squishy and vulnerable to pass-through from repeated abuse from fellow archers, especially the compound shooters. Doing a bit of 3D is a great way to bond with a new bow as long as I remember to bring enough arrows and allocate enough time to search for the inevitable misses. I probably had about a 50% hit rate, typically from stochastic arrow error from incorrect spine. The trajectory is also a tiny bit flatter than my recurve, although at 25 yards and under, the aim is about the same between the longbow and the recurve, which is really good so I don't have to spend as much time re-calibrating if I decide to shoot both bows in the same day.




I'm still calibrating and tuning my T/D longbow (yet to be named but operating under the use-name "Sparrowhawk") but it looks like the 1916s with a 125 grain point are working pretty darned well. The 1913s aren't quite spined right -- looks like I'm going to get the 145 or 160 grain points for them, but in the meanwhile, they've been serving me reasonably well. With a bit of clever calculation, I could probably get both bows to use the same arrows -- a slightly longer 1916 arrow could easily spine correctly for both bows and with a bit of proper tuning and luck, I could probably even use the same points!