Friday, 30 August 2013

Field Masters Round 4


Hi everybody!

Sunday the 18th of August was round 4 of the Welsh Field Masters Tour, and this one was a Hunter round at Fonmon. The weather forecast wasn’t too bad, but it had rained for 2 solid days before the shoot and North course at Fonmon is slippery at the best of times, so it was going to be tricky!

We arrived and got signed in/set up in good time, I verified my marks were good and then we went out in our groups onto the course. As expected the course was very slippery,  I almost went over a few times and a few people had a hard landing sliding down the slopes!

All was going well until we reached the bottom part of the course which is under heavy tree cover. The lighting was terrible, and it was very hard to see the targets through the scope. A few targets had us stood in light, shooting into shaded areas and I accidentally shot an X on the wrong face on a walk-up losing 5 points - oops!

I made a good comeback though in the afternoon and put in a stronger score. My favourite moment though was the second chance at Target 1. This is a 64/70 yard (depending on the round) walk-up, shooting downhill at near 30 degrees. It is Fonmon's trademark shot and is very difficult - so you can imagine how pleased I was when I scored XXX5 and cleared the full 20 points on it - result!

 

In the end I finished up on 528 and took the gold for stage 4! It would’ve been a 533 had I shot that X on the right target. Fonmon North is considered one of the toughest courses in the WFAA at the moment so I was really happy with my score, even with the mistake.

Coming out of the shoot, I was pleased with my shooting but I wanted to check things over as the bow is making a bit more noise than usual on the shot and feels like it is kicking. I found the problem to be the tiller. I was changing tiller a while ago to find the best balance and found the top limb was wound in 2/3 of a turn more than the bottom. I levelled them both and then added about 1/8 of a turn to the top limb to get it to my usual sweet spot and it sounds and feels better now, nailing tight groups and shooting well.

On the subject of bow tuning, the Bowtech Brigadier is coming together nicely! My friend Dave cleared out all the overspray from the threads so I could reassemble it properly, and Kevin at Wales Archery Specialists has made me a new set of strings for it.

This is what it’s looking like now fully assembled, but with the old strings still on it. The new ones are black with red end serving.



I also bought a new set of indoor arrows while I was in Wales Archery. My 2315's are a little beat up, and they are spined to be shot out of the much faster Insanity CPXL. The Brigadier is a slower bow, so I grabbed a dozen 2314's with slightly lighter points. These will give me optimum spine at my usual 55-56lb but in a correct length arrow (not a huge overhang) and be a fair bit lighter so I will reclaim a little speed.
 
I am trying the new Gas-Pro indoor points with these, and I have ditched my Super Nock - G Nock reducers and will be trying the Easton Microlite Super nocks. These will be more consistent and they are nice and minimal, not huge like the regular Super nocks that I do not like using.
 
 
The fletches have arrived for them (red 4" Bohning Killer Vanes) and I have ordered a new clamp for my jig to put them on with a helical twist instead of just offset, to see if that makes them more stable. I will be fletching these up when the clamp arrives and will start the tuning process then to get the Brigadier up to spec ready for the winter indoor season.
 
I still have a few field shoots left to go before this though, the next ones being a mixed FITA round in a weeks time, the final round of the Welsh Field Masters Tour shortly afterwards and then the FITA Welsh Championships so plenty to keep me busy until then!

Wednesday, 14 August 2013

New Target - The Block Black

Hi everybody!

My layered foam garden target has been out in the elements for 6 years and has taken an absolute beating in that time. I must have put 20-30k shots into it over that time and it has been rebanded and ratcheted down more times than i can count.

Its finally given up the ghost though, and even with the softer boss I was given by a friend behind it I am burying arrows in it up the nocks or getting pass-throughs quite often. The time has come to get a new target! Enter the Block Black...







The Block Black is made by Field Logic in the USA and comes in a variety of sizes. I went for a middle sized one at 18" and it is bigger than I expected in the flesh. It cost £92 so it is a bit pricey, but if it performs up to its claims and the reviews I have read all over the net it will be worth the investment.

The  BB target is essentially a cube of a high density self healing foam, with a central core similar to a layered target but under high compression and fused together with Field Logic's patented 'Poly-Fusion' process. It has an inset solid carry handle at the top and is fairly light for its size so it is very portable to move around or take with you if you want to go mobile!

Regular faces can be pinned to it, but it already has high contrast targets stencilled onto the 4 shootable sides. 4 of them are multi-dot patterns and one side has an animal target showing the vitals as this is from the US market, and is aimed primarily at bow hunters.

A nice feature is that all of the  multi dots are offset from the ones on the opposite sides. This means once a side is completely shot out and you turn it, the new dots are over fresh foam so you can shoot out 4 targets in one.

So - stopping power...






I was a little short on time and didn't have chance to set up my full Unlimited rig, so I grabbed my Bow Hunter gear to test it. This is a Bowtech Guardian shooting ACC's, 56lb at about 280fps. I popped the target halfway up my garden steps so it was being shot very close, from about 5-6 yards and I was impressed with its performance.

The arrows don't thump or whack into it, they seem to be slowed down gently and still had plenty of material behind them. If it can stop them that well, at that speed from that close then I have lots of confidence with it. This was in the thinnest orientation as well, if you shoot the other sides you get another few inches of target behind them for extra stopping power.

Arrow extraction was as easy as they claim, the arrows slide out nice and easy.  I only had time to shoot about 2 dozen arrows into it so it got 4-5 arrows in each spot and they were all stopped well. In a training session I normally shoot 5-6 dozen so that will only be about 12 arrows per spot per session. At that rate I should get a lot of use out of each spot before they start getting soft, and then I will just change sides. Once all 4 sides are eventually shot out, I will stencil new spots onto it in the unused areas. I can see this lasting a long time!

Before I put it away, I couldn't resist having a pop at the animal target on it - especially considering I was holding a Bowhunter style bow...


Got him!




So only a quick session to try it out, but so far I am impressed with the quality, finish and stopping power of this Block Black target. The various surfaces and offset spots should offer a long target life and value for money. I will post a follow up to this review in a couple of weeks once I have shot several training sessions on the target, and report in on how it is holding up.

Thanks for looking!


Tuesday, 6 August 2013

UKIFAC - The UK & Ireland Field Archery Championships 2013


Hi everybody!

The weekend of 3/4th of August was the UK & Ireland Field Archery Championships, hosted by Forest Spirit Archers in Kirkcaldy, Fife.... the big one!

The WFAA fielded a large team this year, and I was part of the group that travelled up together on the minibus to the event. We all met up early on Friday morning, loaded up and hit the road! It’s a good thing that we left early, the traffic in the midlands was atrocious and it took 11 and half hours to reach the hotel! We got booked in, gear stowed and went out for dinner and a few drinks to wind down after such a long trip.

 

In the morning, we all met up and went to the course in the minibus and met up with the rest of the Welsh team who had travelled down by themselves. Once we had registered and got our welcome packs and scorecards, I went to the practice butts to check everything over. I’m glad I did this as I identified that my shots were all going low, good groups but mostly 4's instead of the spot for any given distance. I ran out of practice time before I could sort it properly and we went into our groups and out onto the course for the first round.

one of the wood carvings out on the course
 
On the first day, I was shooting a Hunter round on the East course. I started off with a 19 but they were all still low, skirting the bottom edge of the spot. In the few targets that followed I shot 2 x 17’s before I identified what had happened. At some point on the journey down, my bag must have been crushed and my arrow rest had been pushed down just slightly. I loosened it and moved it back up a touch, literally less than a mm and locked it back down.

In the 13 targets that followed I only dropped 5 points, scoring 255 out of a possible 260 so that definitely did the trick! I kept this kind of performance up for most of the round, with a few 18’s near the end on the longer shots and those that were exposed to the wind. The wind was quite harsh all weekend but the courses were in dense woodland so only a few targets really felt it.

Really nice shot through the trees - literally!
 
 
In the end, I finished the Hunter round on 536 points – a new pb by 2 points which put me into first place going into day 2! I was absolutely over the moon with this performance, and I feel sure that if my rest had been in the right place at the start, and if I hadn’t deflected a shot off another archer’s arrow into the 4 ring that I might have hit 540!

We all retreated back to the hotel to get cleaned up, changed and we went back out for dinner at the same pub as on Friday night. I had plenty to drink, a fantastic curry and a great evening!

Cyril John, President of the WFAA

I think we'd had a few too many at this stage!

Posing on the Glenrothes monument!
 

We all met up in the morning again, nursing our sore heads from the night before, and got the minibus loaded up with everything for the long drive home after the shoot. We arrived in plenty of time on day 2 and I went back onto the practice butts to verify everything was ok this time around.

We were split into target groups by ranking and I was in the top group, shooting head to head with the other archers contending for the top spots. We had a good day shooting together and the competition was tight. We were at each other’s heels all day and there were only a few points in it towards the end. We were grouping so tightly that on the shared targets we kept shooting nocks and fletches off, and one of the archers in our group was down to his last useable arrows when we finished!

Getting crowded on the 50 yard target

The standard of shooting was very high at this tournament
 
 
We finished the round and the scores went in, and there was a bit of a delay before the award ceremony as the Pro shooters were still on the course. When it was all finished and the results were announced, I was absolutely thrilled to find out that I had finished in second place and had taken the silver medal in AMFU! First place was taken by Daniel Rae who shot extremely well and deserved the win, and third place went to Dennis Groom.

Now for the best part...once the final awards had been given, they announced the results of the Home Nations Challenge. To compete in this, each country must field a team of 2 x Compound, 2 x Recurve, a BowHunter and a Historical archer and I was one of the compound archers selected by out team captain at the start of the event.
 
All the scores are added and the highest cumulative score wins. The results were read out, and Wales took the top spot by a commanding lead! We were all called up and presented with a gold medal and Gary Hart, the team captain called the whole Welsh squad together for a team photo with the trophy.
 

 

This was an incredible achievement, and it is the first time that Wales have brought the Home Nations trophy home since 1992 – the first win in 21 years! Mat Symmonds and Cyril John, VP and President of the WFAA congratulated the whole team on our most successful UKIFAC turnout in memory, with 7 new champions and many more silver and bronze medallists as well as the Home Nations win.

It took about 9 hours to get home because of some bad weather slowing us down on the motorway, and we arrived back in South Wales in the early hours of Monday morning, but spirits were high and we all considered it to be an incredible trip.

All in all, a very successful weekend that will be hard to top!