Tag Archives: shooting

Apr 23 2013

Shoot report – Severn Valley 21st April 2013

Starting Announcements
Its been a while since my last shoot report due to a trapped nerve in my shoulder preventing me from shooting. So this shoot report is from the view of a marshal rather than competitor, but I hope you will still find it interesting.
Each year SVYF runs 2 shoots one in April and the other  in October and last weekend saw us host our first shoot of the year.
Archers arriving

Archers arriving on Sunday

We were lucky with weather as it stayed dry all day and nowhere near as blustery as the previous weekend, which had seen numerous branches down.
Saturday saw us, along with other club members, descend on the wood from before 8 am setting up the 3d targets, clearing paths and ensuring directional signs were up. The club house was tidied and kitchen cleaned from top to bottom in readiness for all the cooking that would take place.
Sadly recent weeks have seen the death of the land owner of our wood and the passing of Pete Bates, a well known character in field archery. Rather than having a minutes silence  it was decided to have 30 seconds silence followed by 30 seconds of applause in respect of their memories and achievements.
The course is split in two halves with separate course layers setting each side (A+B) which makes for a variety of shots and spreads the work load.
3d target

3d target on A Course

The Spring course is made up of 40 targets with a  mix of paper and 3ds. This time round it included a few special shots –  fan shots and negative shots where if your arrow hit the wrong target you lost 10 points.

B course layers

B course layers message to archers

With an average of 4 to a peg it gave us about 160+ archers and 20-30 marshals and cooking staff so the wood was pretty busy.
As a marshal your role is to ensure the shoot is running smoothly.

Long bear shot

Long bear shot on B course

There was  a good mix of traditional archers shooting longbow and American flat bows, along with those shooting compound bows with or without sites. All targets are over unmarked distances so judging the distance is very important and complicated by the use of avenue shots or dead ground.

Shooting group

Shooting group on one of the numerous bridges we have

As a marshal your role is to ensure the shoot is running well. Duties including helping search for lost arrows, replacing paper faces and guiding people out first thing on the walk out.

Another target on B course

Another target on B course – with marshals checking view

A friend who was shooting had a pedometer on and he said at the end of the shoot he’d walked 4 miles round the course. If that’s true I must have walked over 10 as I walked the entire course twice and one loop 2-3 times more helping search for arrows etc. Truth be told I was shattered when we finally got home on Sunday night.  At least we have 6 months before we have to do it all again.

For those interested full shoot results are available off the club website here. The feedback has been very positive from those attending.
As always thanks for reading.

Mar 14 2013

Tips and Advice – screw in points

Getting the perfect matched arrow takes time and relies on a number of factors, from overall arrow weight,  to flexibility / spine of the shaft, fletching size etc. One of  these factors is the weight of the pile or point. A heavier pile makes the arrow flex more, whilst a lighter pile makes the arrow stiffer.

For this reason we have been trying to fine tune Sharons’ arrows (Easton X7) and have recently changed her points from glue in pins to screw in points with obvious inserts into the aluminum shafts. The X7 are great arrows, and work well from here bow but we thought we might get a slight improvement. By using inserts we have a greater access to different point weights to experiment with.

Sharon Shooting

Sharon Shooting

The old piles came in at 60 grains and the feeling was it might be making the arrow a little too stiff. So we spent sometime looking at alternatives. By the way we have looked at going for carbon arrows but Sharon preferred the X7 as Carbon ones, as the carbons came in too physically light for here bow.

I’ve used a 2 part epoxy glue to secure the inserts into the shafts, which appears to work well. We’ve opted for these inserts and points which we got from Bow Sports. The inserts are 8/32 with 9/32bullet points.

Arrow points and insert

Arrow point and insert

The one thing with we’ve discovered is that the screw in points sometimes work lose. Now the easy answer to this is to apply a little glue, the only problem with this being that if you need to remove the piles the only answer is to then heat it up to break the glues bonds, which will also break the bonds of the glue used to hold the insert in.

One trick I’ve come up with using plumbers tape or PTFE tape. I cut a small piece about an inch in length and then wrap this round the threaded bolt, then screw this into the insert in the arrow.

new pile and insert

New pile, you can see the tape wrapped round thread.

The result of using the tape is to make the threaded bolt a little tighter in the insert, so making it less likely to undo or loosen.

Technical Facts for those interested in weights etc

  • Old piles / nibs were 60 grain
  • Insert 14 grains
  • New screw in points 80 grain

Hope you find this of use and as always thanks for reading.

Feb 15 2013

First shoot of year

Paget de Vasey  host their annual shoot this Sunday and it will be our first shoot for the 2013 season.  You can see a past shoot report from last years shoot here.

It will also be the first shoot Sharon will have competed at since recovering from breaking her finger. ( original post)

Sharons hand

Sharon’s hand, a few days after breaking finger.

As both a coach and husband I know how much this will mean to her. Sharon gets as much from archery as she puts in, and she puts in a lot of effort.

Sharon Shooting at wood

She also uses archery as a method of relaxing from the stresses and pressure of working life. So without archery she has been a little grumpy which is understandable and yes she would admit that. We’ve been very fortunate that Steve Parsons at our club (SVYF) lent her a lighter draw weight bow (30lb draw weight) which has helped her build the strength back. (Thanks Steve and Happy Birthday for Saturday)

Whether she wins a medal or not I am just hoping that she remembers to

  1.  Enjoys the day.
  2.  Doesn’t get frustrated if not shooting well.
  3. Remembers I love her.

Recovering from injury is not always easy and often we put additional pressure on ourselves concerning our own expectations of performance. We often think we can immediately go back to the level of performance we had previously.

Whilst in reality we need to take things slow and steady and you will then succeed.

If you push it too far or too fast, you run the risk of aggravating the injury or depress yourself as you aren’t performing at the level you feel you should.

You can say this is a normal thing for a coach to say, but it also something I have had to learn the hard way too. and is true of all sports and activities.

In my case with archery it was following a car accident that left me unable to shoot my bow for several months, but this is a lesson I have had to learn elsewhere too, but that’s another story for another day.

Thanks for reading and I’ll try to post a write-up of the shoot next week.