New sight tape weekend

Could not find any tournament this weekend either Saturday or Sunday so I went to First Flight Archery to shoot. I shot my Olympic Recurve first then my Outdoor target bow. Sunday I went to Boneyard Archery it is very nice that it is open on Sunday afternoon also they have a 50 yard indoor archery range, the perfect location for creating a sight tape. Jonathan allowed me to both use their computer to log into Archers Advantages Online to print my sight tapes and to move back to 60 yards to get a 60 yard sighting. I made a tape and installed it then tested it. I was not happy with the 60 yard sighting, it just did not seem right. So I made a tape using the 20 yard and 60 yard sighting, I also made one using 20 yards and 50 yards. I checked both of these tapes against the original tape the 20 - 60 yards was just too different so I used the 20 - 50 yard tape. I checked the tape shooting at 20, 30, 40 & 50 yards and found it to be true. Eli helped me by making the measurements of the bow Friday at the range.
Sight to Pep 33.25"
Pep height 4.25"
Draw length 31.625"
20 yards - 19
30 yards - 25.5 - 6.5
40 yards - 31.95 - 6.45
50 yards - 40.8 - 8.85
60 yards - 47.2 - 6.4

20 yards

30 yards

40 yards

50 yards

60 yards

Durham County Wildlife Club NAFF shoot

We shot 14 field and 14 hunter, 28 targets four arrows each for 112 arrows. It was a beautiful day and a good time. I had changed where I place my sight on its bar from number 11 to number 8 per recommendations from George Ryals this however messed up my sight tape a bit due to this changing one of the measurements used to create the tapes in Archers Advantage. I made two mistakes just silly errors one the first target at 35 feet I set my sight at 35 yards and missed but hit the target and did not lose my arrow, on the 70 yard target on the hunter side I set my sight for 78 yards thinking I was at 80 yards again I hit the target and did not lose my arrow. My only two misses also I did not lose or destroy any arrows. I was thinking of only shooting 14 targets but was refreshed some after lunch and it was such a nice day I went to shoot the final 14. I did OK until target 24 where I decided I needed to sit and rest. I was shooting with Leslie and Tony so I told them to go on and that I would just finish on my own after I rested. When the group following us of Eli, Hunter, Eli's father and sister had past me I was thinking about starting again when I saw Joe following them shooting alone. He came up and sat and rested a while himself then we shot the rest of the round together. We rested at each target which helped me and it was very enjoyable shooting with Joe. I only shot 458 but with my sight tape being off and each first shot on each target being a ranging shot I did not do too bad. I will get the sight tape fixed and will do better next time. I did get very tired by the end and maybe should not have shot the second 14 but I really wanted to. The new boots I was wearing were hurting my feet also. I hope the break in soom it was easy getting around the woods wearing them. I got there for 9AM and finished around 4:45 PM with only lunch and the last four targets getting to rest I was on my feet a long time. It did make it not possible to shoot 3D Sunday which I also wanted to do.

NC Senior Games Archery Tournament Hillsboro Orange county NC

This was a different sort of tournament for me. I was shooting at the bottom of my age group of 65 to 69 on my compound bow with a sight and release. We were in a soccer field behind the Recreation Center in Hillsboro. It was cold, my car said it was 39° we we started at about 9AM. It was a 600 round with 4 ends of 5 arrows at 60 then 50 and lastly at 40 yards. We were shooting at 122mm target faces. I had never shot this face or this sort of event before. It was fun and interesting. there were four of us of each target so the ment 20 arrows each end. Much to my surprise there were no arrows destroyed just two fletching damaged, one of them was one of mine but it is an easy repair. I shot 553 out of 600 which was fair but not as good as I had hopped. It was however good enough for me to be first place in my division. There was wind and it was a bit of a factor but not to bad. My bow preformed well it did develop a sort of rattle but I isolated it to the upper cam and got a start wrench set from my bag, found and tighten a slightly loos bolt on the cam. Thanks to Brian from First Flight Archery I was able to shoot Sunday at 60, 50 and 40 yards and was therefore better prepared than I would have been otherwise also I got to check my sight tape for

errors and was able to dial them in quickly at the tournament. I did have one minor error. On my first arrow of the first practice round I shot under the target due to not resetting my sight from 20 yards to 60 yards from practicing at First Flight Archery at Monday night JOAD. My arrow hit the netting of a knocked down soccer goal and was undamaged and easy to find. There were about 18 of us there shooting, There were six compound bow archers and I think the rest were barebow, I may be wrong but I do not remember seeing any Olympic recurve archers there. There may have been recurve archers with sights but without stabilizers. It was interesting watching the barebow archers, some of them had to aim very high to shoot the distance. I am not sure I could do that. This was fun and I would do it again, it is sort of a shame we had to take off work to shoot it, I think more folks might shoot if it was on a weekend day.

3D shoot at Tar River Archery

Today I went on my first 3D archery shoot in over two month due to the fall I took on my first 3D this year. That fall eventually lead to me not being able to walk for a while. It was great to be out shooting again with so many friends. On the practice range and during the first three targets my arrows kept going way right of where I was aiming and no adjustment seem to make much of a difference. That was when I discovered that my scope was twisted off to the side and was not pointing to the target. I assume this happened during the fall. I had aim off to the left of where I wanted my arrow to hit the rest of the round. Making right adjustments to the sight did not have much effect. I examined the sight carefully and I do not think it is damaged but just one of its adjustments it squid. I am hoping just need to realign it. I did not shoot that well shooting a 170 but no misses and only two 5s.


 I was able to readjust the sight and get it working. Both the second and third axises then spent a lot of time shooting to align the sight.

April Pin shoot

I have gone back to one JOAD membership so I am only allowed to shoot for pins one night each month at First Flight archery. Tonight I shot my Olympic Recurve. Over the last three months I have done a lot of work on this bow to make sure it is correctly setup and tuned. I have also replaced her arrows with X10s with tungsten points from Tophat.

I have also been getting some coaching on shooting this bow which has resulted in my completely changing my shot routine. Originally John and Brian also a little for Leslie they had been working with me to produce the classic NTS shot routine but I found it very difficult and a bit painful to do. I was just not able to get my arm to pull the bow back low under my chin and then to move up under my chin, I was also having trouble with the bow string hitting my chest while doing this. Leslie suggested I watch Brady Ellison shoot on Youtube so I could see how he moves his shoulder forward to get his chest out of the way. Well that turned out to be a revelation for me. Not only does Brady move his shoulder to get more room for the bow string he has a completely different shot routine than the NTS standard. Brady draws the bowstring back high to his face at about ear height the once he has his hand even with his cheek he then lowers his hand to the under the chin/jawbone position which is typical of NTS. He does this without moving his head. He then releases and follows through just like an NTS archers. What is so great for me about this is I can do it just like Brady or at least what I am doing seems to me to be just like Brady and I have no pain or problems. I have been practicing this ways for several practice session before pin night and was shooting a bit better. Sometimes I would shoot real tight groups but other times I would surround the gold in the red rings and also there were some wild arrows. I am assuming I am just not consistanting doing the routine I think I am doing and need more practice.

Tonight I shot at 193, I need 230 for my next pin so that is not even close but it is an improvement on how I was shooting trying to adopt the classic NTS routine. I will do some video of what I am doing but I am pretty sure most of my erratic shots a due to poor release of the bow string.

The photo was my practice on Monday before pint night, sorry not picture from pin night.