The Think Tank

One of our better ends

The Sherwood-Nottingham shoot has always been one of my favorites.  It started in 1956 when the Mayor of Sherwood, Oregon, wrote to the Lord Mayor of Nottinghamshire, England, and proposed an archery challenge.  The Lord Mayor agreed, and the tournament was started.

We shoot 90 arrows a day (30 arrows at each of three distances: 60, 50 & 40 yards), two days in a row.  The top 8 archers form the team for their respective city, the scores are sent over in a secret envelope, and when everything is done the scores are compared and a winner is crowned.  The wining team gets to keep an intricately engraved silver bowl (recently appraised at more than $8,000) for the year.

Our shoot is held in conjunction with the Sherwood Robin Hood Festival , always held on the third weekend of July.  The local schools elect Maid Marion and her Court – selected primarily for civic achievements and activities in her community – and she starts our tournament every year. This year I had the honor of helping Keith Kemmerer instruct Maid Marion on how to shoot her bow (she’d never shot archery before).

This years shoot took place on one of the rainiest July weekends that Oregon has ever seen, and it marked only the second time since 1989 that the shoot was rained on.

Saturday started out with some drizzles, but quickly changed to dry and windy.  The wind picked up the throughout the day, keeping things challenging as distances got shorter, but it wasn’t anything too terrible.

I shot alright at 60 and 40, but 50 was sort of disappointing.  I ended with an 877 out of a possible 900.  I haven’t been able to find a list of previous results, but I seem to remember shooting in the mid 880’s the last time I shot in this tournament, nine or ten years ago.  877 wasn’t bad, but I dind’t think it was anything to shout about.  Still, it was good enough to put me in first place by 10 points after the first day.

Sunday was a different matter.  The wind was gone, which was fortunate, but in its stead was an impressive rainstorm.  It was raining so hard at 60 yards that I had to add 2-3 yards to my sight marks to compensate for the rain pounding the arrows out of the air.

My first 12 arrows were very rough.  I was shooting a clarifier in my peep site (a device that makes the image in my scope appear more clear), but the rainy weather and warm temperatures caused the piece of glass in the clarifier to fog up, which meant I could see absolutely nothing.  Its hard to shoot when you can’t see anything.  I tried several things to correct the problem, but nothing worked very well.  This did not reflect well on my score card: after 12 arrows, I was down 10 points.  (That equaled the total that I missed at that distance on Saturday).  I finally just used a small allen wrench to pop the glass out of the clarifier.

After that I could actually see, although the scope was still pretty covered in rain drops which made it hard to see at times as well.  But even when it was bad, I could at least see some part of the target, which wasn’t the case when the clarifier was foggy.

I finished 6 points worse after 60 yards than I had been the day before, but aside from the first two ends, I was shooting pretty well.  We moved up to 50 yards and I shot much better, beating Saturdays score by 4 at that distance.  We moved up to 40 yards to finish the day, and the rains started again in earnest.  I took a little bit of a guess at the site mark, attempting to offset the drop that would be caused by the rain.  As it turned out, I gave it a little too much, and my first arrow missed out the bottom by abut 1/4 inch.  I adjusted my site and the next arrow pinwheeled the X.  I went on to finish the round with a 299 out of 300.  I would have liked to clean it, but I was happy with that performance in the end.

When I added everything up, I finished with 877 again, for a total of 1754.  As I mentioned earlier 877 is not a bad score, but it isn’t anything that I felt was particularly special, although given the weather conditions it was more respectable.  So I was very surprised to learn that the 10 point lead I had to start the day had ballooned into a 43 point victory.

As the rest of the scores were revealed, it was determined that all of the Sherwood teams – Compond, Recurve, Longbow and Juniors – beat our cousins across the pond. It was a total US sweep.  The Bowl is ours for another year.

The Sherwood Compound Team managed another victory, but it was by one of the narrowest margins ever: 270 points.  (By contrast, in 1994 we whooped them Brits by  more than 2,000 points).  I guess we will need to pick it up for next year!

I will post a link to the final results when they become available.