It’s time to kick my quest for a 300 Vegas score off again! Last year was going fairly well right up until I got distracted by the Colorado elk archery season, extra time spent at work, and the final nail in the coffin, lack of enough daylight to shoot after getting home from work.
Regardless of the issues that put things on hold, I have not waned in my desire to improve my target shooting and move to the next level. After a busy start to the year, I’ve finally been able to start shooting paper after work again! This year has gone well so far in other aspects; my wife has started shooting again now that we can leave the kids alone in the evenings. We have been shooting indoor 3D leagues and have done fairly well. This has helped me improve with my hunting rig, but has left my target bow neglected.
A couple of weeks ago I started shooting my Hoyt Ultra Elite again and got it tuned with new strings and swapped out my traditional d-loop for a torqueless loop instead. This required a switch from pin nocks to uni-bushings and nocks. The small, short throat of the pin nock did not get along with the angle of the string caused by having the torqueless loop below the nock instead of the standard loop straddling it.
Anyhow, I present my first full 300 round of the year:
Green dots are warm up ends, blue dots are official scoring
I was somewhat surprised at how well I shot for not having focused on paper for so long. However, during my indoor 3D leagues I have spent significant time focusing on using proper back tension and not settling for a shot merely in the vicinity of where I want the arrow to go. This has helped improve my mental game to some degree.
Speaking of the mental game, on end seven you can see the shot where I had a complete mental lapse and nearly shot an eight in the upper left corner of target one! This was a perfect example of simply letting my mind wander, thus costing me a 300. Face number two (lower right) tended to be my worst face, with three shots bordering on the nine line. For whatever reason, I would generally shoot a good arrow for my first shot, slack off on the second, then get back into the game with a good third shot. Once again, this is a weakness in my mental game.
Overall I was very pleased with this round and it is one of my best to date, 299 with 21x. I know that it’s a matter of relaxing my mind and concentrating only on floating my sight ring onto the target. Also, I need to be better at letting down when it’s obvious my mind isn’t focus or if something else is not correct in my form.
That 300 will come soon!
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Looks like some good shooting to me, my real question is, are there any competitions that you might know of in the Las Vegas area between now and the Vegas International?