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.  (continue reading…)

I got some exciting news the other day:  Archery World, the pro shop up in Vancouver, has added me to their stable of Staff Shooters.  Basically that means I am sponsored  by them, so I get discounts on my equipment and what not, and in return I wear their shirts and try to be a good ambassador for the shop and the sport in general.  I’ll also help out at a few events throughout the year that the shop either puts on or participates in, usually helping to get young kids into the sport.

Rose Festival Fireworks 2012

Mom, Joel, Shannon and myself went down to see the Rose Festival Fireworks again this year, and I think we got some good shots.  Click through for the pictures!

Annular Solar Eclipse May 2012

Mom and I drove down to Medford on Sunday so we could get the best view of a very rare celestial event: an annular solar eclipse.  As with all solar eclipses, when the Moon passes between the Earth and Sun a shadow is cast which, depending on your location on the planet, can block all or most of the of Suns rays.

Unlike a full solar eclipse, which blocks the entire visible part of the Sun (the photosphere) an annular solar eclipse leaves a thin “Ring of Fire” around the Moons shadow.  (The name is derived from the Greek word annulus, meaning ring.)

There was a fairly narrow band stretching around the globe where you could witness the “totality” in full.  In our neck of the woods, the band ranged from around Eureka, California to Medford, Oregon.  When viewed within that band, the Moon blocked about 94% of the Sun.

Mom and I cruised down there just for the event, and everything worked about as well as could be hoped for.  The car did develop a bit of an overheating issue – as this car has been known to do, this time due to a sticking thermostat – but it got us just far enough for us to get a great spot to take some photos.  It got us back home again too!

We’d done some reading and knew that we needed to have some kind of special filters to photograph the eclipse, but we were unable to find one in town or online that could be shipped in time.  However, we did discover that you can use welding glass, so we bought some of that and decided to give it a try.  For viewing the eclipse with the naked eye, the welding glass worked great (although the green color was sort of strange), but it wasn’t of high enough quality to get good pictures through.

Fortunately I was able to get some good, unfiltered shots during totality.  I had to stop the camera all the way down to F45 and use 1/8000 of a second shutter speed, but that did the trick.  They may not be the best shots, but I think it still pretty cool.

Big Foot at Redding Trail Shoot (2012)

Update 5/24/2012:

I kept myself pretty busy while I was in Redding and didn’t get around to updating this post at the time.

I shot pretty well on the weekend, although I was a couple of points under where I would have liked to have been each day.  But, given that it was my first time, I felt I did OK overall… with the exception of one target.  I suffered what I have coined a Compound Brainfart, because it came from two different angles.

I was shooting at a 19 yard skunk target, and the first mistake I made was mis-setting my sight.  I set to 37.5 instead of 32.5, which means I shot really high.  Fortunately I still managed to catch the top of his tail, which on that target was only down one point.  I really got lucky there because a mis-set sight usually results in a zero.

The trouble was, I was ticked off that I had done that because I was trying to be very careful not to mis set my sight.  (That is something I did in almost every field shoot last year.)  I also should point out that there were eight targets to choose from on the bail, and only two of them had arrows in them at this point.  So, being distracted and upset, I pulled up, settled in on the spot, and drilled a dead center bullseye… in a different target than the one I had tagged in the tail.  There aren’t a lot of rules in Redding, but one of them is that both arrows have to be in the same target.  So I got a zero on that one.

That was a major bummer, but I guess shit happens.  Aside from that I did OK.  If had been able to get a muligan on that damn skunk, I would have come in with a 1515, which would have been good enough for 8th place.  (Out of about 200.)  As it was, I shot a 1503 and came in 18th.

Original Post:

Mom and I are down in Redding so I can shoot in the NFAA National Marked 3D Championships.

We have some photos from the shoot and from Lasson National Volcanic Park, but I haven’t gotten around to posting them yet.  Hopefully I will get to that over the weekend.

I shot pretty well today, although I dropped a few at the end of the day which took me from really good to just acceptable.  I wound up dropping 8 points on the day.  I feel like I could have been down only 4-5, but I struggled with the wind and the hills on the last few targets.  Oh well.

I don’t know placement so far, but I’ve only spoken to one person in my division so far who shot better than I did.  I figure I’m probably in the top ten, and maybe even somewhere around 5th, but that is nothing more than a total guess.

Check back for more details over the weekend.