Field/Hunter Round at Gator Bowmen

My quasi-protege at full draw after the shoot itself. She held her own pretty well for someone with a 20 lb @ 24" mini-recurve and heavy wooden arrows and ZERO experience in field archery!

Pre-shoot calibration at 50 yards while it's relatively warm. Nothing like the joys of calibration drift! I shot some super-tight groups today but man, they were usually in the wrong place... typically significantly high. Put it this way: my typical spot-on point is around 52 yards so I can aim right below the bull's-eye at 50 and can get some really good shots in there. Today? I had to aim at the bottom of the scoring ring to be kinda high in the 50 yard area. My 20-30 yard shots were ok though, but 35+ was a little weird and the nonlinear nature of the calibration drift made for some very entertaining shots. I certainly shot beautiful groups though even if they were out of the scoring ring!

One Annoyed Spider

One of my fellow archers and I were calibrating our shots at 60 and 65 yards in preparation for the upcoming field shoot on Sunday at Gator Bowmen and we were both fumbling around quite a bit. My first end at 65 yards led to a spider narrowly missed being impaled. The spider was on my arrow shaft and it looked like it was trying to decide whether to wrap it up in silk or to bite the crap out of it or both. Yeah... I pretty much did the equivalent of using a battering ram on someone's living room window to that spider's web.

In other news, this song has been stuck in my mind -- Ciaran's Well by Tarja Turunen:

For some reason listening to that song gives me a weird combination of fiction-writing inspiration and a stronger drive to really pump that iron or do those push-ups and sit-ups. I really love her vocal style in this song (and in many of her other songs both in her solo career and in her Nightwish days).

Random Archery Feats

80 yard walk-up target. This was 80, 70, 60, and 50 yards. Let's see if I can replicate this in an actual tournament!

35 yard fan. I don't think I've ever done THAT well on this target ever.

About 70 meters. I'm the black and blue fletch. The compound guy actually got the kill shot but it took them a whole lot more tries to hit him!