Bow Practice - Draw
Moved it back to 30 yards and did some first-arrow practice throughout the day!
Moving back to 30 yards
We cut down a bush yesterday evening so I could shoot past 25 yards. Turns out the bush was right at 30.
I shot three groups right off the bat to ensure I was dialed in to the right distance. Here are my groupings:
You can tell that we started off really sporadic and high (pattern you’ll see throughout today’s practice) and then had it generally centered by arrows 11-15.
At this point I felt confident that we had the distance dialed in right and were ready to do ome first-arrow practice.
First-arrow practice
The bow hunting practice regimen has a recommended exercise to help setup your bow by confirming your draw length.
The exercise
- Put target at 30 yards
- Shoot arrow every ~15 minutes until you have a five-shot group of all first-shot arrows
- If your shots are consistent, don’t do anything. If they are scattered left/right, your draw length is likely too short. If they are scattered up/down, it is likely too long.
- Adjust your D-loop for minor adjustments, otherwise your draw length, and then try again.
How we did
I ended up shooting 5 shots throughout the day, pulling my arrow after every shot (not a lot of trust in my arrows as I am shooting different types and different ages, so I pulled it and took pictures throughout the day.
My strikes are shown below:
The first shot was horribly high, and then the other four all hovered around the top middle target, all within a larger circle of each other. Consistency was pretty good but I keep noticing that I am missing high.
After the fifth arrow I decided to nock another arrow to see what happens and I ended up shooting way lower.
I think my subconscious is compensating for the assumed height issues and is dropping subsequent arrows closer to the target. This is a really valuable thing to acknowledge so we can try to get closer to the center from the start.
Analysis
With my first 15 arrows I noticed that I started high and worked my way down until my last 5 arrows all hovered around the center circle.
With my next first-arrow drill I noticed that all my shots, spaced ~15 minutes apart, were consistently hitting the top middle circle while I was aiming for the middle circle.
I don’t think I have a draw length issue, but instead need a sight adjustment or have a stabilizer balance issue. The simple solution might be to adjust my sight up a bit to drop the arrows down. That being said I do feel like my reticle floats beneath the target and I often find myself slapping the trigger once it covers the center. This might be inadvertenly pulling my shots high. I’ll try some stabilizer/hovering drills tomorrow to see if there is anything there.
My peep sight also stopped rotating as much today. I had to adjust my D-loop probably 4 times through ~20 shots, which is better than the ~10 adjustments I made yesterday.
Things are coming along nicely! I have some target sight tape coming in the mail early next week which should be just in time to get everything lined up. Another good practice and I’m excited to get back out there again tomorrow.