The Think Tank

The last few weeks have been very busy, enough so that I was not able to keep this site up to date.  Since the beginning of June we’ve pretty much had an archery tournament or a bike ride every weekend.  I won’t go into a lot of detail, but I will try to recap everything below and include links to photos where applicable.

Click through for all the details.  June 23-24
Oregon State Field Championships

The State Field was down at Cascadian this year (near Junction City).  I felt pretty good going into this event as I had been turning in some of my best scores in practice, but those were all in very ideal weather conditions.  This weekend the weather gods saw fit to flex all their muscles: at various times is rained, it was sunny, it was windy, it was humid… just a little bit of everything.  For about an hour on Sunday we were literally in the damn clouds, up on the highside of the range.

I was shooting my new PSE which I’ve had for a few months, but I hadn’t shot with it in the rain prior to this, and it reacts differently than I was used to.  My sight marks kept moving lower and lower through out the day, with the result that I was out the bottom pretty much all day.  I was quite frustrated, Sunday in particular.  I wound up finishing in fourth place, which is not horrible given the people who beat me, but I was probably twenty points under where I felt I could have been.  My friend Darren Thornton won, shooting a pair of personal bests on the weekend, which was really nice to see because he had been struggling a bit this year.  To rival him I would have had to have put up some personal bests as well, but I felt I could/should have easily been in the hunt for second.

Debbie brought her trailer to the range and mom and I stayed with her for the weekend.  She had double knee replacement surgery at the beginning of May, so she didn’t quite feel up to walking a field course yet, but she did shoot on the practice range in preparation for some shoots coming up later in the year.

June 30-July 1
Greater Oregon Safari

The very next weekend we were back at Cascadian for the Safari, a shoot very similar to the Redding Trail Shoot down in Redding, CA earlier in the year.  This time around I was a bit more prepared for the weather and the changes I needed to make when it started getting wet out, which is did with gusto.  It poured down rain on for about six straight hours on the first day, and at least half the time the second day.

I felt that I shot a lot better this time around, although I still wound up 4th place.  I was tied for 3rd after the first day, and finished only 5 points out of first, so we were pretty bunched up.  Mark Eaves won this weekend, and since he is the reining National Champion, I figured being five points back wasn’t too bad.  Naturally, there were a few arrows that I would like to have back, especially during one little stretch on Sunday, but in all in all I was pretty satisfied.

I also shot in the Team event with my friend from Seattle, Andy Ludwig, and we came in third, which was good, $215 bucks each.  That was a lot better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.  Plus, I hit the money dot on the 102 yard target (about the size of 50 cent piece), which earned me another $38.75.

Winning a little money turned out to be very fortuitous because my binoculars filled up with rain and pretty much died over the weekend, so I used most of my winnings to buy a nice, new, waterproof pair. 

The next weekend was State Games.  This is an unusual round and did not draw many of the archers who usually make up the stable, so the competitive balance was very different than it had been the previous two weeks.  I had made some changes to my setup after Safari in the hopes that it might help with the issues in the rain, but there was certainly no rain to be had.  Instead we had temps nearing 100 degrees some pretty decent wind.

I was very disappointed in my first days score and my bow performance, so I stayed around after the shoot and put in about three hours of practice and work on the bow.  It paid off the next day as I started out about ten points ahead after the first 5-6 targets, but eventually the extra arrows took their toll and my shoulder really started hurting.  I finished the day up a few points over the day before, but on the whole I felt a lot better about things on Sunday.

I wound up winning by a comfortable margin, which qualified me to compete in the National Games next year in Pennsylvania.

Debbie also shot in this tournament, the first since her knee surgeries only two months earlier.  She was a little frustrated with her score, but all in all I thought she performed incredibly well and she won her division, Senior Ladies Freestyle.  Just to brag her up, if she had registered in the regular Ladies division, she still would have won by a lot.

Joel and I participated in the Seattle To Portland bike ride for the third year running.  The weather cooperated quite nicely, despite a few sprinkles on Sunday.  All in all everything went really well. Our average moving speed was up about two miles per hour over our previous attempts, but strange things kept happening to slow us down, the biggest of which was when Joel’s wheel – not his tire, but his wheel – blew out.  One of the strangest things I’ve ever seen.

Mom was serving as our own personal support wagon again this year, so she picked him up and took him to the next mechanics tent, about eight miles down the road.  As luck would have it, the fellow had literally grabbed a mountain bike rim on his way out the door, and it was exactly what Joel needed.  And the real kicker?  The total cost of the wheel and installation both was $20 dollars.  What a steal!

I pulled into the parking lot of the rest area just as Joel was returning from getting his new wheel, so that we arrived at the van at the same time.  Hard to get much better than that.

We passed the Welcome to Centralia sign about half an hour ahead of last years pace, maybe a little more, and were immediately confronted with a train that delayed us (and about 300 other people) for at least twenty minutes.  Which, of course, meant that we got in dead on our normal time of ten hours, although we were much earlier in the day as we left earlier.

Sunday was difficult to start out because it was cold, and we were a “just a bit” hungover from our celebrations.  The weather stayed cool and occasionally drizzly for the first 75 miles or so, and then it warmed up in time for us to make the final push into town.

Before leaving for Seattle, Joel told his people we would be crossing the finish line at 4:20, so we were working hard to accomplish that goal.  All day long we were doing the match and adjusting our pace to get us in on time.  As we got in to Portland proper, we were both about just about out of gas and we had no margin of error to hit our arrival time.  We pushed hard the last ten miles or so and we were looking good right up until we started encountering stop lights.  We literally hit every single stop light red we came across, a couple of them we hit twice.  Because of this we crossed the line at 4:23 by my watch.

July 21-22
Sherwood-Nottingham Shoot

This is probably my favorite shoot of the year.  This year marks the 56th year that this tournament between Nottingham, England and Sherwood, Oregon has been held.  Each city holds a tournament, and the top four or eight archers (depending on the division) form that cities team.  They shoot theirs a few weeks before we shoot ours, and the scores are kept strictly confidential until the end of the tournament.  The winner gets to keep the prestigious Silver Bowel.

Last year the shoot was rained on for the first time since the 80’s, but while it looked like it might rain a few times, this year was pretty much ideal from a weather perspective.  And perhaps because of that, this was one of the bigger events for turn-out, with almost 60 people pre-registered.

I had turned in a couple of good 900 round scores in practice, so I felt pretty confident going in.  I really thought that I should be able to stay at 890 or better, which is to say that I wanted to miss no more than ten arrows on the day.  That goal became nearly impossible to achieve when I dropped five points in my first six arrows.  I pulled my stuff together and shot pretty well the rest of the day, but finished with a 885.  Still a respectable score, but I really wanted to do better.

The second day was better, although my shoulder was bothering me very early on for some reason, and I pretty much knew it was going to be a struggle the whole day.  I finished up the day with an 889, the final miss coming at the closest distance, which was disappointing, but what can you do?  It wasn’t far off my goal, and it was good enough to secure the win and a 20 point improvement over last years score, so I was pleased.

Debbie also shot this weekend, and she also made the team again this year.  I was very proud of her for that.  She beat out a number of people to get there, improved pretty dramatically over her performance from two weeks prior at State Games, and she did it with two brandy new (and still painful) knees.  I think that was great.

In the end, Sherwood wooped on the Brits in all four division, securing our hold on the Bowl and setting a new record for most consecutive wins at 16 years in a row.