I tried using my Inaction Camera for something other than timelapse today. The kid and I went for a short casual archery practice today because the usual juniors coaching wasn't on this week, and I decided to take the Go Ultra along with us. The video quality is good at least, the archery quality maybe not so much.
#stabbingatadistance — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #stabbingatadistance, aggregated by home.social.
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Archery is very good for clearing your mind of the mundane frustrations of day-to-day life, and replacing them with more arcane frustrations.
I didn't shoot as well as I did last week, but there were a few tantalising glimpses of accuracy, just enough to suggest that I could actually shoot well if I just did some more practice.
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The arrows in the photo in the preceding post were absolutely not representative of how I was shooting today in general, but I was going better than I have done in the last few weeks (which wouldn't be hard) and felt confident enough to move the target back from 40 metres to 50 metres distance. It looks a really, really long way away when you're not used to it!
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Gold at the end of the rainbow this afternoon at the archery range 🌈
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A slightly frustrating archery practice today. I shot a few really good ends (by my standards) but also shot a bunch of lousy ones, and ended up with an average (47.6) slightly lower than I got last week (48.7). Progress in the wrong direction.
When everything clicks and I do it right I hit gold (at 30 metres), but I'm spending much of my time not doing it right and I'm not entirely sure what I'm doing differently. I'll try to arrange a coaching session for next weekend in order to, hopefully, find out.
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Glorious late autumn weather at the archery range this afternoon. 21°C and sunny with light winds, and the red rumped parrots were hanging out next to the targets again.
The kid was coached with the club juniors group and meanwhile I had a good practice by myself down at the far end of the range. I am moving in the right direction in both conditioning and accuracy, and managed to get through 20 ends before fatigue became an issue.
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Uh-oh. I'm being tempted by archery bling. I absolutely do not need a carbon fibre clicker with anodised parts colour coordinated with my bow's riser. I've already got a plain steel and black plastic one that works fine. I do want one though...
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I can, currently, just about cram all of the kid's and my archery gear into one Legend XT-720 archery backpack. I can cycle with this on my back, but it is pretty heavy and bulky.
That is why I'm interested in the Burley Travoy bicycle trailer, which is basically a two wheel hand trolley that can attach to your bike: https://burley.com/en-in/products/travoy
I think I could strap the archery backpack straight to the trailer, which would take the load off my back and make the ride to and from the range even more pleasant. Bonus, the Travoy folds down small for storage, so wouldn't take up much space while not in use.
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Archery practice for me today, while the kid was getting coached as part of the club's juniors group.
I'm getting some condition back so had much less difficulty with fatigue than I had last week, and got through 16 ends over an hour and a half or so. I'm still getting used to using the clicker, but I did hit mostly red at 30 metres distance which isn't too bad for me. I would like to be consistently hitting mostly gold though, which I have done in the past at this distance.
The kid and I cycled to and from the range today, we're really lucky to be within easy cycling range of the club. It's a really nice ride too, off road shared use paths almost the entire way. At 3.2 km on level ground each way it makes for a good gentle warm up and warm down.
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Back to #StabbingAtADistance this weekend, after a four week gap due to the school holidays. During that time our coach cut our arrows down to a sensible length, finally unlocking for us the recurve target archer's secret weapon: the clicker.
Yesterday we had a coaching session where we were introduced to the clicker and got used to it while shooting at a blank butt at close range, while today we got to try shooting at a target, the kid with the junior coaching group and me practicing by myself.
The kid immediately loves shooting with a clicker, while it's taking me a while to get used to it. In part that is due to having to dial my sight in again for the shorter arrows, but largely it's due to having lost condition during the time away from the range. Even with my low draw weight bow after an hour or so I started struggling to expand through the clicker towards the end of each end, and by an hour and a half I'd been reduced to shooting abbreviated ends of only four arrows and decided to call it a day shortly after.
Before Easter I had convinced myself I was ready to try a higher draw weight, but I'm not going to even consider that until I get back to being able to shoot for 2 hours without struggling with fatigue.
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CW: Minor injury, archery, stupidity
Some painful lessons from archery practice today.
Shortly after starting to shoot I had a misfire. The bowstring slammed into my arm and the arrow fell just in front of me. I couldn't work out what had happened. There didn't seem to be anything wrong with either the bow or arrow, and I hadn't had anything quite like this happen before. Confused and sore I carried on shooting and all was fine for an end or two, but then it happened again. Now bewildered and very sore I spent some time trying to work out what was happening. I wondered if the arrow had dropped off the arrow rest just before release, but it didn't seem that it had. At a loss I shot a few more ends then it happened a third time. This attracted the attention of a couple of other club members who came over to see if I was OK and help me work out what was happening. Consensus was that the most likely explanation was that my arrow nocks were too loose on the bowstring and my finger tab was allowing my forefinger to rest on the top of the arrow, and the combination was causing me to inadvertently dislodge the arrow from the string during release. At this point I decided to end my practice for the day.
Several things I (re)learned:
1. Excessively loose nocks are dangerous, it's better to err on the side of too tight. I knew this, but not well enough it seems.
2. Nocks can get looser over time due to wear, so they may start OK but become dangerous later. Check this regularly, replace nocks as required.
3. Finger tabs should be adjusted to prevent too much contact with the arrow.
4. Even a low draw weight bow (my limbs are 24 lb) stores a *scary* amount of energy at full draw. When most of that energy gets directed into slapping your arm instead of propelling an arrow it really, really hurts.
5. If you're doing something and it suddenly really, really hurts you DON'T KEEP DOING THE THING UNTIL IT HURTS YOU SEVERAL MORE TIMES. Stop, and only continue *after* you've worked out what was going wrong. -
Thinking ahead to the school holidays and wondering whether we'll be able to do some archery practice while we're in Brisbane for two weeks starting over the Easter weekend.
Looking for target archery clubs that allow visiting members of other Archery Australia affiliated clubs to shoot on their range on a casual basis, ideally on the north side of town.
Samford Valley Target Archers seem to fit the bill, as do Mount Petrie Bowmen and Centenary Archers Club apart from them being not so conveniently located for us. Are there others that I'm missing?
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The photos that aren't of an archery target are of the archery lizard. This water skink was keeping an eye on things from under the club house.
#LizardPosting #Archery #SkinksOfMastodon #StabbingAtADistance #LizardsOfMastodon #Skink #Lizard
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What my photo feed looks like after an archery practice session. I do this mainly to keep count of how many ends I've shot. Today, while the kid was in the youth squad coaching session, I got through 20 ends (120 arrows).
I am feeling that I might be able to handle a higher draw weight at this point.
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Meanwhile I did manage to get 11 ends in myself, mostly before the rain started. Challenging conditions with blustery winds from the start, but I did OK.
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The SOPA Youth Squad did manage to do an hour and a half of shooting by setting up on the under cover shooting line, but even they retreated inside the club house eventually.
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Warm at the range today for the kid's and my coaching session with coach Alex.
The facilities at SOPA are really very good, especially when the lines are freshly repainted and the targets have been recently repaired.
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You can call me Fletcher...
8 of the kid's 12 arrows had a vane that had either come off entirely or was starting to come away, and on every arrow it was the upper vane. Odd.
Anyway, I have glued fresh vanes onto all the arrows. Hopefully the kid's fletchings will hold together now.
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I managed to get the kid to join the archery club's youth coaching programme for the first time today. They weren't keen, but I think it'll do them a lot of good.
While that was going on I did some practice by myself, shooting for only the second time since 2 months off over the school holidays. Best I could manage at 40 metres was a couple of ends of 49 and I still felt a bit rusty, but based on my photos from practices last year it looks like I'm more or less back to where I was before the break.
The only negative today was vanes coming off four of the kid's arrow in the space of less than 2 hours. These are in addition to 3 other arrows of theirs that previously shed vanes, so now they're down to only 5 good arrows. I don't know why the kid is losing so many vanes when I haven't had a single one come off and I have the same make and model (Pandarus Alpha XT). Maybe their vanes are hitting their bow due to bad tuning, or maybe they just got a badly glued batch. Regardless of the cause I've got a lot of arrow maintenance to do before next weekend.
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Archery selfie video with a twist...
Recording some of my shooting should help me fix my form errors, but the second part of this video clip is a just-for-fun thing I've been looking forward to doing ever since I decided to get the Insta360 Go Ultra.
I actually recorded that bit in 8x slow motion, but sped it back up to full speed in the edit to keep the clip length down.
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Now that summer holidays are over and the kid is settling into high school we were able to cycle over to the archery club and do our first practice in two months. Very rusty, but it still felt good to do some stabbing-at-a-distance again.
This also gave me an opportunity to finally try out our tiny Svbony spotting scope and lightweight Smallrig tripod for the main purpose I bought them. I've got to say I'm very pleased with both of them. The view through the scope is clearer than it looks in my mobile phone snap.
I also did some experimenting with the Go Ultra, which I can also put on the tripod.
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@aviancer Thanks.
Most archers seem to use 20-60x80 spotting scopes, but I came across a video by a former high level archer and current coach who said he almost never zoomed in beyond 25x. That gave me the idea that the 9-27x56 would be enough scope for the job, and it's so much smaller!
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Adorable baby telescope! It even comes with a telescope onesie!
I finally got my hands on the spotting scope I ordered, an Svbony SV410 9-27x56 ED. This is mainly for archery, so that I can see where my arrows have hit. Together with the SmallRig Travel Video Tripod it makes for a very portable setup that should be easy to carry in my archery backpack when cycling to the range.
First impressions are good. The build quality feels solid and the images are sharp to the edge of the field, with no chromatic aberration that I could see.
Unfortunately with the holidays I probably won't get a chance to try it out at the archery club until the end of January, but I might try a bit of birding or astronomy with it.
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This does beg the question, what exactly did I expect it to do? It's just a watch with a GPS receiver, a heartrate monitor, and a few other sensors. It logged a GPS track and heartrate, because that's what it does.
I don't know, maybe it could do something clever with the accelerometers and detect when I shoot so that it can count arrows for me. Probably hard to do that reliably, though, and there are plenty of other ways to count arrows. I've started taking a photo of the target each time I go to collect my arrows so that I can keep track of how many I've shot just by counting the photos and multiplying by 6.
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I find it amusing that my new Garmin Forerunner 255 fitness tracker watch has archery included amongst its long list of activity types, but all that it ends up doing is recording a GPS track of me ambling to the target to collect my arrows then ambling back to the shooting line, again and again.
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I am realising how useful videoing each other might be for working on our form. I gave the kid a few suggestions after watching this slow-mo.
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Kid and I did follow through on the plan to cycle to the range for some archery practice late Sunday afternoon, after the worst of the weekend's heat and wind had passed. Conditions were still a bit blustery but I reckon it was indeed the best time for us to do our stabbing-at-a-distance. We ended up shooting 72 arrows each at 40 metres and 20 metres distance respectively, with somewhat mixed results.
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The sensible move would be to go early tomorrow before it gets either too hot or too windy, but the range will be occupied up until about 11 am by the regular Saturday morning SOPA club shoot. Of course the kid and I could sign up to take part in the club shoot, but I've had a really hard time persuading them to give it a go.
https://archersdiary.com/EventEnrol.aspx?id=e23d0bd2-3d43-4e32-90ad-7bc57a88e0de
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Hmmm. Going to do stabbing-at-a-distance at the usual middle of the day Saturday time might not be the best idea this weekend. Standing in the sun for a couple of hours when the air temperatures are approaching 40°C is not ideal no matter how good your bucket hat is.
Looks like Sunday is going to be much more reasonable temperature-wise but on the other hand it's going to be pretty windy all day, which isn't what you want when you're shooting pointy sticks either.
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Down on the range today, for a bit of individual archery practice.
I shot 120 arrows at 40 metres distance. Pretty inconsistent results but useful nonetheless, I think.