The Think Tank

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.

Since I started shooting again last year, I have wanted to build myself a target that I could use to shoot at home when I don’t have time to get to the range.  I have several different places where I can shoot: Inside the garage I can get about 6 yards, enough to practice form and do paper tuning, etc; Across the back yard (North-South) I can get 13 yards, shooting toward the concrete wall between our yard and our neighbors; And along the side of the house I can get about 30 yards depending on where I stand.  This last option will require me to get some kind of a back drop which could stop an arrow should I suffer an equipment malfunction, which I haven’t come up with yet.  So until I do, I can still use the other two options.

A long time ago I had a foam target which I used, but it got shot out pretty fast and eventually started letting arrows pass through it, which of course is unsafe and made my neighbors unhappy.  I needed something that would last a long time, be fairly cheap to build, and could be portable enough to move around wherever I wanted it in the yard or garage.

The first thing I needed to do was to decide on the material for the bale itself.  Eventually I settled on phone books under pressure.  When I was a youngster, The Nock Point up in Seattle used phone book bales and I remembered them working really well.  Plus, phone books have the added benefit of being free!

I found some good instructions for building the compression shelf here, and then I more or less made up the stand as I went along.  Total cost for the project was about $60, not counting a few bits which I had left over from other projects.

I started shooting at it on Friday and put the finishing touches on it today.  I have to say, it works great! It stops the arrows dead in five inches (at six yards, less from farther away), yet the arrows pull out easily, and   since I’m shooting into the books from the end (toward the spine), the pages more or less separate and do not get damaged.  This means the they should last for a long time.  The arrow holes almost completely close up after about thirty minutes, and even when I put the arrows in the same holes over and over again (which happens a lot at six yards) it still stops the arrows dead.

Click through for full instructions and building materials if you are interested.

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Debbie and I competed in this years Northwest Shootup Tour, a series of tournaments held throughout Oregon and Washington in December and January, culminating in the Final this weekend in Camas.  In order to qualify for the Final, you had to compete in at least three of the first ten legs.

In all there were more than 120 people who competed over the course of the whole Tour, and this years payouts were the largest ever.  All told there was over $3,000 handed out this weekend.

Debbie continued to improve over the course of the whole series, which sort of worked against her in some ways.  She wound up winning the Second Flight back in December, and since then she improved her average score a bit, which stuck her at the bottom of the First Flight instead of the top of the Second.  That is good in that it means she shot better, but it is unfortunate in that it means she would have to shoot through a whole lot of people in the Elimination rounds to get into the money.

She shot really great this weekend, eliminating four people and moving up three places, making the largest jump in placement of anyone in the whole event.  She started out 11th over all, and finished in 8th place in the First Flight.

I shot fairly well in the earlier stages of the Tour, but the last three events were not so good for me.  Still I manged to be ranked 3rd over the course of the entire event, and I moved up enough to compete for the win, but in the end I lost by two X’s and finished second.

It was a very fun experience and I look forward to competing in it again next year.

Full results can be found here.

The final results for the Washington State Multi-Color championships came in yesterday, and I was surprised to find that I finished third.  I shot pretty well the second day, but I shot what I felt was a very mediocre score the first day, so I was quite surprised to find that I had finished in the medals.

Full results can be found here.  My division is A-M-FS.

In case any of you are wondering why it is called the “Multi-Color” championships, it is because we shoot at a target like the one at left, which has multiple colors.  Officially this is called a FITA (Federation of International Target Archery) face, but FITA scores this target differently then the National Field Archery Association does, so there are now two different rounds: FITA rounds, and what most of us call Vegas rounds, named after the World Archery Festival held each year in Las Vegas.  Apparently Washington decided that “Washington State Vegas Championships” did not sound good, and since they also have a State FITA Championship, they went with “Multi-Color Championships.”  This also helps to differentiate it from another commonly shot round, which uses a target that is all blue with a white bullseye.  Washington calls this tournament their “Blue Face” championship.

PS – Back in November I shot in the Washington State Indoor FITA Championships, where I came in first place.  I was surprised about that one too.  😉

I got the official results from the Washington State Indoor FITA that I shot in last month, and it turns out that I won!  There wasn’t a huge turn out, only 10 people in the mens division which is pretty low, but I guess a win is a win.  I figured I was probably in the top 4-5, but I did not think that my score would be terribly competitive, so I was quite surprised when I saw the results tonight.

Full results are here.  My division is Senior Male Compound Release.