My events for Nationals 2011 have finished as I am not shooting the clout to be held at Samford tomorrow. It has been a bit of a mixed week overall for me. Results wise, they were quite disappointing for me, however they can't be 100% blamed upon any one reason or other in particular.
The first major lesson I learnt is that any changes, no matter how small, will have some affect upon your kit. I had changed the wraps and fletches on my arrows, and while their vertical height behaviour were the same, their tuning had changed and quite possibly made my arrows weak. This posed problems for me all week where I attempted to deal with windage issues of not being centered on the sight. Big lesson learnt. If you change something, always do a tune.
Shooting wise, I also discovered that while the Carbon Blades do as advertised, they are not fantastic in a bowl swirling wind kind of venue that the Hannay range is at Mt Petrie. Besides typical left and right push behaviour from the winds, very strange up and down lift/push pressures were experienced by me with the very high winds that came through the venue from a head-on and swirl behaviour (since the range has some interesting wind-channels.
Other things, I was able to shoot reasonably by aiming off during the field course. I've never really done that before, but I know now that I am capable of doing so if needs be. I was told that I was canting also in the wind, and either use my sight pin rod to gain a horizontal reference, or stack weights onto the bow to resist the twist from wind push.
I was reasonably okay with the resulting placings at a national championship in that at least I didn't wooden spoon. But, it is all practice as usual, so back onto the track and more practice for the next event.
