Great Day's Shooting

I took the Near-lithic bow to the field shoot at the Aurora Club... Brilliant!
I shot round with my mates Mick (who took the video) and Lawrance who was shooting a Yew bow that I'd made.

The bow performed superbly, most of my misses were high, as the bow was surprisingly fast.

I shot steadily for the first half, not blanking a single target, but also not getting any first arrow kills. I eventually blanked one and also had a 3rd arrow glance off the centre of a rock hard old 3D Owl which rather irritated me. But I had a lucky poor shot (paw shot... tee hee) on a bear.
After lunch I'd settle down and stopped thinking... the first arrow kills and inner kills suddenly started coming. See this video of the bow in action:- https://youtu.be/sEOEcoNsFFs

Also the pro kill on the giant mosquito!



I gave the bow a good inspection when we'd finished and it looked fine. You can see the tiller in the still grabbed from the video, it looks great, and that shot was a first arrow kill at decent range (you can tell from the angle of the aim)
The weather held fine despite the forecast for afternoon rain (hence the waterproof tucked in belt).
The turnout at the shoot was fairly sparse, (lots of other events were on this weekend) which mean we shot round without being held up at all. It was a joy to shoot in perfect conditions and at our own pace.

The bacon and egg butty and fruit cake with tea from the catering tent was just the job to keep up the energy levels too.

It was a lovely friendly atmosphere and well organised (despite us 3 old gits being unable to see direction signs!)
The deer set out in the field was at a testing distance, but I was invited to have another go at it as the course was quiet (non scoring of course)... still took me 3 arrow to hit it... D'oh. Good to chat to some new faces too.

Thanks to all at Aurora for their fine course and hospitality.

For anyone who likes the minutiae of these things:-
There were 36 targets, but one consisted of 2 piglets with one arrow at each.
I scored 474 with 16 of those being first arrow hits.
5 of those were first arrow kills, with two of those being inner kills.
Over the first half I scored 208. Over the second half 266 which shows how I had got used to the bow.
I got 2 blanks but one was a good solid shot that glanced of the rock hard old target (an Owl... it would have knocked it off it's perch)

I like the bow so much I'm considering re-tillering Twister a few pounds lighter whilst trying to retain the speed. Or maybe I'll just make a lightweight Hazel bow instead, I don't want to risk spoiling Twister as it's such a great bow.

The pic of the 3 bows shows the difference in brace height between a primitive and and Mick's AFB of modern materials.
Mick scored best with over 500 (the AFB has a much flatter trajectory) and Lawrance beat me by a little which is pretty much what I'd expect. I don't profess to be a good shot, merely a reasonable one. I was more than happy with my performance. I expect if we'd swapped bows the result would well have been the same!

Just checked on the Aurora website and I won the Sunday Primitive class... mind there were only two of us shooting primitive LOL !