My First Archery Shot

I recently got a new bow.

I’d had a chance to play with archery while at the boy’s Scout camp and realized it was the sort of thing I could sink my teeth into. Fortunately, my Texas-born neighbor is an archer and has some coaching skills to boot. So after talking with him, I was all setup with a nice recurve style bow. We ordered it last week; it arrived yesterday; he brought it over today to set up.

The only caveat was the limbs we had ordered are on backorder. Fortunately, the Neighbor is a generous chap and he’s loaned me a spare pair of limbs for the interim. So, after mounting the limbs in the riser and then stringing the bow, I went and grabbed the boy’s target and went outside to take a few shots.

Here are the results of my first shot:

The shot was from roughly 10 yards away. I missed the target high and hit the slide. There was an impressive BANG from the impact. It was one of those moments where my first thought was “I didn’t really just do that, did I? … Yes, I did.”

Here’s the piece, it’s about 1/4″ thick as well:

The arrow itself was unharmed. It’s flight path seemed basically unaltered as well as it buried itself in the dirt a few feet beyond the slide. I was astonished. The arrow shafts are thin tubes with thin walls. The points are somewhat beefier, solid with about 1/2″ exposed and then another inch-and-a-half or so stuck back into the arrow shaft. While I was sure it could pierce things easily enough, the level of power demonstrated here was unexpected. I suspect a direct shot on a bone would result in a pretty severe fracture, among other things.

Several shots later, and with the target moved over so I wouldn’t hit the slide, I missed high again and buried an arrow in one of the timbers I used to frame a sandbox for the kids. We couldn’t pull it out. I ended up having to drill into the timber in order to release the arrow. It had buried itself about an inch into the wood.

After that we completely changed course and placed the target in front of a hill. Now, when I missed, the arrow would go into the hill immediately behind the target. That area of the lawn will get well aerated.