Saturday 5th March 2011

@ Northern Archers

Overcast mostly, rain squalls, gusty winds at times.

4x 6 arrow ends @ 90m, 122cm warmup

FITA90

Total 168

The weather conditions were pretty ordinary at best for the shoot, and was quite distracting in how it was changing.  There was a bit of wind that probably was a bit of headwind since sight settings were a bit off early on with my 90m settings low, so I had to wind it down 2 full turns to get back on track.  Unfortunately my shooting today was also pretty ordinary.

I struggled through 90m, had a reasonable 70m, was crusing to a great 50m until toe end where I had a total collapse, but recovered with a solid 30m result.  As usual, my 90m score was quite the letdown, but overall everything was a bit off.

90m: 33 37 39 37 42 41 = 229

70m: 45 49 48 50 49 42 = 283

50m: 26 25 27 23 20 27 25 21 25 24 19 15 = 277

30m: 27 28 28 30 26 25 28 29 27 28 28 27 = 331

Total 1120.

By comparison to the Metro's a few weekends back, I was 29 points down from Day 1, though in thought, besides the heat, Day 1 Metro was pretty good conditions.  Day 2 Metro's I shot a 1130 with some gusty wind conditions coming up that made things a little more interesting.

I also had an opportunity to chat with Jesse McDonald from the ACT, and he recommended tuning the centershot different to the 'standard Hoyt manual' position, so rather than the right hand edge of the arrow being lined to the left hand edge of the string when at brace height position, he recommended that it only be half a point out from dead center, so that from the dead center centreshot position, you wind until the right edge of the point is dead center.

He also recommended setting windage to dead center on a perfect still day, and learning to shoot off instead of windage adjustments.  In discussing training methodology, his philosophy was to have a varied, but singular-point-session approach.  In this approach, you focus upon only one thing each session, but vary the focus session-to-session, rather than a continuous focus upon one thing for multiple sessions in a row.

I quite like this and so will probably switch to this methodology

He also recommended tuning your bow every 3 weeks or so, probably once a month is acceptable really, checking your tiller position, checking centershot, checking your poundage etc, as depending on how your bow is, it may shift (such as string creep if it's a new string) or if vibrations are changing things minutely over time.  It's quite a solid idea really and it's not terribly time consuming, and just requires shooting some bareshafts with fletched too to ensure the tune still holds true.and rather mess around with the tuning of my bow setup right now, will see how it goes on my new setup once it happens.

I'll be shooting the second day of the weekend tomorrow, I doubt that I'm going to shoot terribly better in how I'm feeling and the weather, but it's all just practice.