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.

As many of you know because you so generously donated on my behalf, Joel and I took part in Reach the Beach, an annual bike ride fundraiser for the American Lung Association.

This year’s ride caused a bit of a stir and earned some airtime on the local news stations because the police in Amity – the halfway point on the 104 mile ride from Portland – setup a sting operation for bikers who ran a stop sign.  I have definite opinions on that, but I will address those in a bit.

All in all the ride raised more than $600,000 dollars for the ALA, which is a great accomplishment and an event record.  The ride was limited to 3,000 riders and sold out more than two weeks before the deadline.

The ride itself proved to be very pretty and mostly enjoyable, but much more difficult than either Joel or I thought it would be, and I had anticipated it being pretty tough.

Everyone I spoke to about the ride insisted that it was very flat, and indeed there was a significant portion of dead flat land from Newberg to Grand Ronde, but that leaves about 75 miles of climbing.  It wasn’t always super steep, but it was pretty constant.  As is clearly evident in the picture above, I am not a pristine physical specimen, but even still, this was pretty tough.

In fact, it was so hard that neither Joel or I finished.  Joel made it 50 miles and I got as far as 82, but eventually the hills and killer headwind were too much for me.

Click through for the full details.

(continue reading…)

*** UPDATE ***

With the aid of some Goof Off and Turtlewax Rubbing Compound – and a little bit of elbow grease – we managed to get all of the paint off of my car.  So at least there is a happy ending to this frustrating tale.

*** ****

We went down to Sweet Home last weekend to help Debbie repair/replace her fence that was blown down back in March, and when we returned home we found that someone had spray-painted my Corsica.

Adding insult to injury, a fuel injector went out on my Z on the way to Shannon’s house last night.

All-in-all, it was a rough weekend for my cars.

Mom and I came up to Seattle last night so I could shoot in a club-hosted STAR FITA event this weekend, which is just a fancy way to say that this tournament meets all of the qualifications of a US Archery Association shoot, and therefore any score shot at this eventcounts towards team qualifications and national and/or world records.

Sadly, I do not have to worry about breaking any national or world records this weekend.  Today stunk to high heaven.  I experimented with an adjustment to my rest yesterday, actually making the arrow tune out as it should instead of relying on group-tuning, which is to say adjusting things until it seems to group well despite the arrow being all catiwhompass on the bow.  It seemed to be working alright yesterday afternoon, but today was a whole different story.

Sadly still, I can’t blame it all on that.  I shot pretty badly on top of everything, not holding well, executing poorly and eventually I got very frustrated and had a hard time even thinking straight, much less shooting straight.

I shot a 1335 today, which is 105 points off perfect. It wasn’t the worst score I’ve ever shot, but it was definitely among the worst I can remember.   (To give some contrast, National Champions are shooting right around 1400, and you can probably make the US Archery Team if you stay in the 1380’s.  Decent guys at the state level shoot around the 1360’s.  I expected to shoot around 1350-1360 and I sailed smoothly under that bar without even rustling my hair.)

They didn’t get around to posting the scores by the time I left, so I don’t know for sure, but the only guy I saw who was scoring worse than me was the poor fellow who lost an arrow early in the morning and only had five arrows left to shoot… which is problematic, since you are actually supposed to shoot six arrows at a time.

Oh well.

Seems like every post I’ve made about a tournament since my return to archery has been pretty much just like this one: not the worst I’ve ever done, but very far below where I think I should be at this stage, which in turn is along way under where I was.  This one was more disappointing to me the others, since I’ve been practicing pretty well lately, so I thought I might actually be able to do something respectable this weekend.

I did put the rest back during lunch, and the second half of the day was better, although not terribly impressive given that we were at the close distances.  Still, it did give me a little glimmer of hope for tomorrow.

We will start out tomorrow with an elimination round at 10 AM, and follow that up with 900 round in the afternoon.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock the last couple of days, you have no doubt heard that Brandon Roy single-handedly pulled the Blazers back from the brink of destruction on Saturday, outscoring the entire Dallas team in the fourth quarter and erasing an 18 point deficit to win the game 84-82 and tie up the series at two games apiece.

What do our beloved Blazers get for all their trouble?  Game Five tonight.  In Dallas.

The stats still favor the Mavericks in this game: They have a deeper bench, they have a lot of veteran savvy, and they have one of the best closers in the NBA.  Worst of all, according to ESPN’s John Hollinger, the win-loss record for series where the higher seeded team has won the first two games is 64-8.

However, there are several things for Blazer fans to be hopeful about.  First and foremost, Portland’s lanky defenders have done a good job of keeping Nowitzki contained for at least three quarters a game, and they did a great job of denying him the ball in the fourth quarter Saturday.  Second, emotions flow like tidal waves, and right now Portland is riding a really high one.  Third, losing a game when you had a 23 point lead with 13 minutes left is enough to shake anyone’s confidence, especially a team that is fighting the demons of early Playoff departures.  And finally, the Dallas Mavericks are one the Not-So-Elite Eight who have found themselves on the wrong side of that 64-8 ratio that Hollinger talked about in his article today.

No matter what demons may be lurking in the back of the Maverick’s minds, Dirk and Company aren’t going to lay down and give us anything.  Portland will need to scratch and claw its way to a first round victory.  So… what does this mean to you?  It means that you need to offer whatever prayers you can to whatever deity you admire… maybe offer up your first born… maybe poke pins in a little blonde-haired doll with a 41 on its back…  maybe even sacrifice an errant virgin or two… whatever it takes.  That’s what it means to be the Sixth Man.

The game will be aired at 5:30PM on KGW.