My 2015 archery season got underway properly yesterday at the Castle Bowmen open shoot in Woodhall Spa. I’ve already done a couple of friendly shoots this year but nothing too serious, although I wouldn’t exactly call yesterdays attempt serious.
I knew it would be hard work, when l started the car to defrost it at 7am the temperature gauge said -3c. Travelling to Woodhall Spa, the temperature went as low as -4.5c. At the start of the shoot, the temperature was -2.5.
Shooting in cold temperatures is always hard work, it’s difficult to keep the muscles warm enough to keep them free, it didn’t help that after two targets we were already stood around waiting for the group in front to clear the targets. Not what you need when it’s that cold. The problem with standing around is that the muscles get cold and each shot is essentially the first shot of the day, you don’t get in to any sort of rhythm. All this resulted in me getting off to a particularly slow start.
By lunchtime, the temperature had increased in to positive numbers and we’d let the group in front have a good head start. I started getting in to a rhythm and my shooting started to improve. At the end of the day, I managed to piece together a score of 590 from 36 targets. Not exactly record breaking, but an average of just over 16 per target and good enough for second place on the day and only 26 points off 1st place.
I’m happy enough with the result, and its a fairly modest start to 2015. I’m off to Woodend Field Archers next weekend. It’s not a course I do well at usually as a lot of it is out in the open which makes distance judging hard for me. I’m hoping to do a lot better than my last performance on this course though.
Onwards and upwards…