3D Nationals 24th & 25th May 2009

Following on from last weeks rather wet shoot at Fleet Ibex I was anticipating a wet weekends shooting but in fact it turned out to be one of the warmest / sunniest weekend of the year, so far, which meant the waterproof never made it out of the car. Osmaston Park provided enough woodland to allow for the laying of 3 courses of which we were due to shoot two. I think the choice of courses was based on luck of the draw because we were shooting in a mixed discipline group. My son and me were picked to shoot the B Course on the Saturday and the C Course on the Sunday (the advantage of this was that the A Course had a 20 minute walk before they could start). Both Courses were of 40 3Ds spread over a 12 Mile trek through some rather interesting woodland.
This was always going to be an interesting weekend, for the same reason last weeks Fleet Ibex was, because I would be shooting a borrowed 40lb Longbow with my arrows matched to my 65lb longbow. So knowing this I was not expecting to have an astounding score I just hoped I would not be too badly embarrassed by my 10 year old son.

Fleet Ibex Shoot Report 17th May 2009

Having watched the the weather forecasts from the previous week I was expecting to be shoot Fleet Ibex in wet conditions but waking up Sunday morning to bright sunshine I thought we were going to have a good day. After the 50 minute drive down to Fleet Ibex the weather had changed slightly and we were in fully wet weather gear. This was the start of one of those days and it was at registration that I realised I had forgotten my NFAS card and my son his shooting glove. Thanks to Carrol the glove problem was resolved and the missing cards could be worked around by joining NFAS again on the day. The weather looked as though it was in for the day but after a 45 minutes the sky brightened and we were ready to shoot. For those who don't know Fleet Ibex this was a classic 40 x 3D course spread across their rather substantial woods (you do a lot of walking at Fleet) mixing the large and small with the long and short shots.

Arrow Making : Of Spine, Materials, Piles and Fletchings

Following a few questions on my previous blog entry "Making Longbow Arrows" I have decided to put together a quick table covering my experience in choosing Arrow material, spine, pile and fletchings. It is based on the Longbow and Warbow I shoot / have shot and my sons bows. Therefore you can consider this as a rough guide but in reality the only sure way of getting your arrow correct is to suck it and see. Ultimately every individual will have the ideal Arrow for their bow but we all need a starting point; so here goes.

Spining your Longbow Arrows

Follow a comment on my previous blog entry "Making Your Own Arrows In Four Easy Steps" concerning the spining of arrows I have decided to produce a blog entry specifically to described how I spine rate my arrows to match my bows. This done I will look at further options around the correct (a rather loose term), for me, fletching size for the job at hand.

Bowmen Of Burleigh Christmas 2008 Fun Shoot

The Bowmen Of Burleigh Christmas fun shoot was originally planned for the 19th December 2008 but due to the fact Embrook School was closed on this date we decided to run it on the first available Sunday in January. So given this the date was rescheduled to 18th January 2009 and fortunately we were still in the Christmas mood. The day was split into a morning and afternoon session, as usual, and further subdivided into Senior and Junior classes. Rather than the traditional Portsmouth faces or even Archery Darts we put together a series of Season appropriate, well sort of, faces and allocated our own marking system. As you can see below these faces ranged from the traditional Christmas Turkey (yes we also field shoot) to the Grinch and Santas Sleigh with presents held on by Polos.

Westcott Indoor 2009 Shoot report

The Annual Westcott NFAS occurred over the weekend of the 18th / 19th January 2009 and based on the fun I had last year I was looking forward to a rather entertaining few hours of shoot. We were due to shoot in 13:30 session but due to the M40 managed to miss this because of an accident that closed it for while. Thanks to a bit of luck and Cass we managed to squeeze onto the later 18:30 session (fun because I did not bring a coat expecting to be out by 17:00).