I often think about the days when I just started competing as a young boy. Bright sunny days, ice cold drinks and good food at the food stalls. The sound of arrows flying, often followed up by laughter. Afterwards people would stay and chat for hours and often braai and have a few cold ones. Fellow archers became friends. Somehow everyone knew who the national champ was even though social media was not even an idea yet. It was great and those memories will always be treasured. I had dreams of becoming a professional shooter and always longed to grow up and be like the famous archers I read about in magazines.
Last week I returned from the USA where I competed in tournaments. Now back home spring is in full force and this time always reminds me of preparation that use to start for the biggest tournament of the year in mid summer. It just puts me in the mood for shooting arrows even though that particular tournament is not scheduled for mid summer anymore and the numbers have slowly vanished. How things have changed. Everything changes constantly and sometimes it might give you a dose of nostalgia. One thing that change gave us is the awesome equipment we have today.
We have super stiff stabilizers, elongated peep sights, clarifiers, the best lenses, limb driven drop away arrowrests, super consistent pure carbon arrows, parallel limbed bows and the list goes on and on. One thing that stands out these days is how we tune our bows. In the old days we use to move the rest mostly to acquire a good tune on the arrow. Often this meant arrows pointing outwards or inwards of the center shot.
Today the correct way is to set your arrow rest at the factory recommendation of the particular bow you have which is often 13/16 of an inch. Depending on what bow brand you shoot you either move the cams left or right, change twists on yokes or move flex guard in or out. This should give a you perfect bullet hole if all is correct. Ones this is done you can shoot a bare shaft and do some minor adjustments on the rest to get it to group with the fletched arrows. 20 yards is a good distance. It might be a good idea to always have a bare shaft handy if you need to check your tune and have no paper available. Any little deviation that might be caused by something that moved will be revealed by a bare shaft
You can therefore adjust whatever needs adjustment to get the bare shaft to impact on the same place it did before. In terms of equipment we live in the greatest area ever. Use every single piece of equipment you have to the best of its ability to help you do your absolute best. Today good enough is not good enough anymore, we need optimum!