Archery n. 18

Total shots now at 306. 20m and 50m details below

So, I tried to really give this whole aiming with a proper sight thing a real chance.

As you can see I superglued a fake plastic pink diamond sparkly thing,¹ with a needle shoved through it after heating it on the stove. It may not look professional, but I tell you, it serves it function just as well as all the fancy ones. Which is to say… totally useless for me.

I am sure there is a reason for this. I am sure I am doing something wrong, probably not being super (or even adequately?) consistent with how and to where I draw the bow and where I hold or how I release, or whatever… but the fact is that at least for now, the whole use a sight to aim thing is disastrous for me and brings no benefit whatsoever.

Out of 9 shots, because I wanted to give it a real chance, I hit the target at 20m only three times. In frustration I fired the last shot instinctively and hit it for a total of 4/10.

By comparison, the next two loads of 6 arrows were 5 hits out of 6, with one flier you can see below. I don’t know if I did something wrong on that shot or if, as with rifles, sometimes you just get a flier. With ammo that is not match ammo you will occasionally get a round that maybe is a bit over or under charged, or seated a bit off and you get a flier at distance, with arrows… I don’t know. Maybe the fletchings weren’t all well aligned after having being fired. Maybe sometimes they just hit the side of the bow or my hand ever so slightly and it affect the flight path… I am just too ignorant to say right now.

and 6 out of 6. Even if only just as the lower right hit shows.

At this point I did a fatal error. Got over-confident, wanted to just rush through the next 6 shots for another 6/6 and reassure myself that at 20m I am now on target pretty much always.

And so of course I scored 3/6 instead.

So I remembered what one should never forget: Stay calm and don’t rush, and tried again.

Result: 5 out 6, and the one I missed was because once again, I tried to “aim” (not with my super-special sight, but just a “bit” by using the riser of the bow indicatively). It was a narrow miss but still a miss.

The missed one was a narrow miss to the left of the target that went under the log.

Second set was again 5/6 even if the miss was again very close. and was AGAIN, the result of tension. In order to improve my ability to stay calm, I do various things in my head. On this last set at 20m I imagined I had to hit a bad guy or else he would reach one of my daughters and harm one of them. It’s maybe a bit grim for most people, but as a good high IQ guy with a bit of Aspieness,² I am very good at compartmentalising, so this kind of thing does not bother me and is in fact a way to develop a skill and also react properly when/if things that put you under pressure happen. It’s really a form of training that all highly trained people do in one form or another.

On the last shot I put undue pressure on trying to ensure I hit the yellow bullseye, and of course, that’s the shot I missed.

Overall lessons, is still the same one:

With archery, a calm mind, like the surface of a still lake, as the Japanese budo masters would put it, is the main thing.

Any tension, any wish to be “good”, any importance given to any spectators, any desire to “really get this shot to be a good one”, are all counter-productive.

There should only be you, the target, and the arrow. In a sense, even the bow “disappears”.

So at this point I decided to fire 6 more shots at 50m range. This is because after having fired 40 shots of a 60lbs bow, you get fairly tired. And doing more extreme things when you are a bit more tired is probably a bad idea for most people, but I trained my body and mind for years to function under pretty bad conditions (lack of sleep, injured, stressed out, etc.) it was all an excuse to try and improve my ability to function as I wanted instead of how my body preferred.

So for me, at least some of the time, doing something that requires even MORE attention to detail when I am tired out, can be a good thing. By this point most of the stupid has been wrung out of you and you can just try to do the thing without your ego getting in the way (however subconsciously it may be).

So I fired 6 shots at 50m and this was the result.

As you can see only one hit the target (the last shot, so it probably indicates some level of adjustment is taking place as I correct from the previous shots, which is a good sign). However, if you look at the arrows numbered 1 and 2, on a human sized target, these could reasonably also be expected to possibly be hits.

The arrow labelled 1 would probably hit the chest, arm or shoulder if the bullseye is assumed to be the centre of gravity of a person (see image below to see what I mean) and the guy was about my size.

And arrow n.2, although you can’t tell from the photograph could quite possibly fly either between the legs, into one of the thighs, or, if one is really unlucky, in the last place any man wants to be shot with anything in.

So, although I only had one hit on target at 50m, in reality it’s maybe not quite as bad.

Review of stated goals

These were:

Goal 1: 70% hit rate of human sized target at 50m. 80% would be excellent.

Current: MAYBE approaching 50% but more like 20% repeatable is probably more likely. So we can assume MAYBE 50% achieved. Need a lot more practice at this distance to be sure.

Goal 2: 40-50% hit out to 100m. 50% would be excellent.

Current: Never even tried and frankly this may be blue-sky thinking, at least for me, at least with my bow, and at least with the amount of time and effort I can devote to this.

Goal 3: Hit a 4” target at 20m 40% of the time and a 6” target 60-70% of the time.

Current: Unknown/Nowhere really. I haven’t been paying much attention to this. I have been focussing on hitting the target, which is 50cm in diameter, and not really looking at where the hits go. 4” is 10cm diameter and 6” is 15cm diameter, which on the current target makes the yellow part roughly mid-way since it’s about 12cm across, and if you include only the first line of red closest to the yellow, then that circle is 15cm across. At this stage I haven’t really recorded the frequency, but it’s not great. I would say probably less than 50% of the way there.

Then again, I am not quite yet at a third of my stated 1,000 shots to get there, so there is still hope.

Happy New Year if I don’t write again before 2026.

1. The kids have been repeatedly warned. Leave your crap lying around, and dad will use it as scrap, bin it, or adorn his manly weapons with your pink sparkly fake diamonds.

2. Ignore the vicious claims from my wife when she occasionally says I am probably a psychopath. She known not what she says… and this usually only comes out when I repeat for the 15,000th time that “Clean as you go along!” is how human civilisation was developed when it comes to cooking in the kitchen.