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Comments on Thursday 22 April 2004:
Today's archery was instructional, and the instructions were twofold: "don't buy arrows from that shop again" and "examine purchased arrows to see if they're the same".

Last time out I was a bit inept, having forgotten how to do everything after a long "weather is too hot" hiatus. Two shots in every six were missing the target completely, until one of the arrows broke, after which it was mostly one shot missing and only occasionally two.

This time out, I was much less inept, having remembered most of the forgotten things by the end of last time. This time, one shot in every six was missing, all the rest were fine, and I was pretty sure I wasn't doing anything wrong. This time, after three rounds of that, I decided to mark the 'miss' arrow to see if it was always the same one. While marking it, the marking rendered itself unnecessary, as I noticed the head of the arrow was fatter than the head of an arrow in my other hand. Or I thought it was, anyway - some experimenting with careful balancing, and eventually a blind test (put one arrow in each hand, and I say which one feels heavier) confirmed that the 'bad' arrow had a much heavier head than the rest. Switching it out for one of the spares resulted in no more misses for the rest of the shoot.

However! In the process of switching for another arrow, I noticed something else. The six arrows I was using had three distinct different head types, in addition to the heavy one I'd removed from play. I only bought twelve arrows, all at once, all from the same shop, with the same shaft type, length, and fletching - surely it should be assumed that I want them all to have the same heads? Presumably I would now be shooting more reliably if I weren't (still) using three different types of arrows whose trajectory behaviours will be distinct.

So that's not very pleasing, arrows not being cheap. But at least it means my horrible shooting last time wasn't actually me shooting (quite so) horribly. Good discovery, bad that it was there to be discovered. [10:40]

AttackOfTheSpam
Urgh, archery. The only time I ever had archery lessons was fifth-grade Camp Classen.

I had to aim two feet to the left of my target's bullseye to hit it. I think they might have given me the left-handed bow.

RavenBlack
Or you were sighting with the wrong eye.

AttackOfTheSpam
I tried with both. Both times I had to aim two feet to the left.

Perhaps I have two wrong eyes.

RavenBlack
That's pretty weird. Changing eye really should knock your aim a bit more than two feet across, one way or the other. So changing eye really should have meant you either had to aim near the right place, or about four feet to the left.

I tried shooting from a bit further away, yesterday, with the rather odd effect that the correct position for the bow is one where I can't see the target at all because it's completely obscured behind the bow.

AttackOfTheSpam
Maybe the bow was warped or something. Perhaps I'd mistaken four feet for two feet in memory, because I was, after all, only ten when I was exposed to archery on a fairly daily basis, not counting the times our cabin skipped lessons to throw rocks at the boys passing under the bridge from the next camp over.

On an odder note, every time I aimed the the left, I hit the bullseye, or at least the innermost ring.
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