St Kingsmark's Annual Portsmouth

Well, the indoor season is now well and truly upon us and I have shot my first competition of the season. It was a nice introduction into the season shooting the Gwent County Championships & Open,  a 3 spot Portsmouth round hosted by St Kingsmark Bowmen at Beachley Army Barracks.

I drove down with Mr Bruno and we were shooting the afternoon session. We arrived a little early so had plenty of time to have some food/drink, get our equipment set up and signed in. The hall was absolutely freezing so I was glad I wore the extra layers under my club strip!

 
I had a bit of a shaky start with a couple of wild 9’s but I managed to find the 10 ring eventually, and held a steady pace for the rest of the shoot and finished on 572 which is a new PB, up from 565 that I shot last year (I haven’t scored a Portsmouth round at all in the last year!) . When the final results came in, the top Gwent shooter was in the 560’s and my score was in second place so I came home with a silver medal in the Open. 

I was over the moon with the result and very happy to bring home something shiny! But I was also a little disappointed with 572 as I was hoping to nudge closer to 580. So as I always do, I looked at this as a learning experience to improve my game. I noticed that my shots that were out of the 10 were almost all low hits, 6 o clock outer  10’s/9’s. After watching a video of myself shooting, and some feedback from a coach at the club it seems that I am relaxing my bow arm prematurely. The arm is relaxing and the bow arm dropping before the shot is complete, so I am going to use my practice sessions to work on keeping the bow arm steady and solid, and keep a firm pull into the back wall against this without pulling the arrow into my face which causes clearance issues and erratic arrow flight.

 

Roll on the next one!