By Chris Elliott…..
Let’s talk about Archery.…… It’s been some weeks now since I was struggling and NIck Gough of Lambousa Archers suggested I seek second opinions and some “one-for-one” coaching which I did from the Girne Archery Club and whilst there was no overnight miracle it helped me focus my mind on my problems and concentrate on analysing them and finding solutions.
One problem I have had is setting up the sight on my bow and even though a number of people adjusted my sight for me as Aysen Tez at Girne Hunting Shooting Sports Club Archery Team said, “We can’t see what you see”, so I have been working on that since I went to a recent archery competition where after lagging behind due to poor sight settings, slowly after shooting 6 sets of 6 arrows at 30m I started to get the distance right and getting the wooden spoon for my efforts in my group and that’s where the hard work started.
Since then, I have been trying to shoot daily in my garden recording sight settings and distances which seemed to improve my shooting which even if my grouping was closing I was still finding I had horizontal and some verticle variations and now I have to concentrate on my recurve bow hand grip, with string to my nose and chin and draw hand tucked tightly into my chin making sure the string picture is in the same place on every shot.
Not forgetting, of course, the release where any snatching of the string on release can cause a left or right arrow flight so I have lots to prepare for as I stand in my open or closed stance whilst ensuring I have a firm hip, leg, and feet stance and now my shooting is starting to improve with a smaller group of arrows going into the target.
Oh yes, that reminds me, the arrows can bend as they fly which may be related to the errors I have made above, or perhaps I need to learn about tuning arrows for the best performance but that’s more lessons to learn in the future.
