Archery and everclear tinctures
Nov. 10th, 2009 09:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
abirdisnot[Modified from an email I wrote my brother because I am too lazy to totally rewrite everything!]
We're doing archery, which is soooooo coooool, and which I love. I think everyone does (8 people in the class including me). I'm still, you know, sucky, but I've improved dramatically, and considering the amount of time I've spent shooting at a target (very little) it seems like a really big improvement.
Today we selected our bowstaves, the long pieces cut from young trees which we will be carving into longbows. The order of selection was based on a number draw, and I was 7 out of 8. D: But I couldn't be happier with the one I got anyway.
One of my classmates just bought a bow at Cabela's (a huge hunting/fishing supply store, they have them scattered around the country, and it is like a mecca for people into that stuff with insanely cool taxidermy*...I haven't been there yet, we may go on a field trip :D) and it's pretty sweet. The bows we're practicing with are pretty inexpensive, hard to break bows out of plastic or fiberglass or something, so that we don't fuck up a good bow during the period of time we don't know wtf we are doing. The draw-weight on these bows is like 25-30 pounds, which is pretty light.. to give some idea, minimum hunting weight in this state is 40.
The one my classmate got is 45 pounds and it's totally sweet--the way the arrow flies, how fast it goes,, and the sound it makes when it hits the target is clearly different (even though we are shooting from just like 15 feet away). Even 45 pounds is hard for us to draw, the bow's owner has a hard time drawing it back and holding it without his arm shaking, and I can barely draw it back all the way. I will have to step up to the plate though, because I want mine to be about 45 pounds so I can use it to hunt with.
Oh, and to give even MORE of an idea, and to make us sound really pathetic, I was reading about English long-bowmen, the guys who would like shoot arrows from hundreds of yards away and pierce armor, and their bows' draw weight could be like 180 pounds. WTFFFFF I don't get how that's humanly possible. Skeletons of those archers have like really deformed arms and bone spurs and stuff. Oh my god HOW.
* * * * * * * * * *
Today we also watched this insane, awesome video Frank (our instructor) had. It's like newsreel shorts from the 40s, black and white with really cheesy narration added over it. It's about these 2 brothers, the Willem brothers, who live in the Mojave desert. It starts out with them driving around their insane... car/jalopy thing, which is like a crude cart-jeep thing with an open top and zero suspension, driving it offroads, over all these ditches and uneven ground and practically bouncing out of the car.
At the bottom of the desert is this dry lakebed, and they "ski" and toboggan down the sand slopes. Sometimes they "waterski" by holding on to a rope attached to their moving car. Which then has no one in it, and is trundling merrily across the desert. So how do they stop it? They fire an arrow at like a 3-inch wide target, which hits this switch they've rigged up and cuts the ignition.
One time the guy goes to fire at the car and stop it and his bow breaks in half. Cue him throwing it down and them frantically running after the car.
Which goes over a ginormous cliff.
They get to the bottom and start it up and it still runs. :D
So yeah, it's the best video ever, and that's only the beginning. The other segments have them crawling up a cliff face in order to trap a bobcat in a net and haul it away with them (why I don't know), shooting increasingly small objects off each other's head (down to like a die and a button), shooting BLINDLY over a hill in order to hit someone's hat on a blanket (and doing it of course), shooting through rings tossed in the air and pinning them to targets, etc. Someone really really needs to put this on youtube.
The style of shooting they are doing and the style we are learning is called instinctive shooting, which means that you don't sight down the arrow or anything, you keep both eyes on the target and just... shoot it so much that you develop the hand-eye coordination to know where it's going to go, like throwing a ball. In their case EXACTLY where it's going to go, to like a square centimeter. It's awesome.
So anyway, in the afternoon we made a tincture from cedar needles, which involves shredding cedar needles, pouring in a bottle of everclear, and shaking it up and letting it sit a couple weeks.
* * * * * * * * * *
Also, here is what string slap looks like, when you don't wear an arm guard (string slap being what happens when you release the bowstring and it hits your arm as it springs forward).
So uh, I'll be better about wearing an armguard now. This is totally happening because I SAID, the other day, that I wasn't having a problem with string slap. I mean, I almost didn't BUY an armguard last night when I went to a sports store. I also bought some arrows--one of which I shot over the target deep into a brush pile, dammit--and a partial glove.
I needed a glove, because although we have some, they are all huge, and make it a lot harder for me to shoot. So I got the "youth" size one, which fit my fingers snugly.
Unfortunately, as I realized today, the wrist strap also comes down to like... the middle of my palm. So I'm gonna have to alter it. In the meantime I'm just... wrapping the strap around my palm.
Oh my god camo lingerie, wtf.
There are thongs.
And a lot of pink camo underwear. What that is supposed to blend in with I do not know.
That's all for now, folks. Next weekend is a survival skills workshop and then we're digging for razor clams.
We're doing archery, which is soooooo coooool, and which I love. I think everyone does (8 people in the class including me). I'm still, you know, sucky, but I've improved dramatically, and considering the amount of time I've spent shooting at a target (very little) it seems like a really big improvement.
Today we selected our bowstaves, the long pieces cut from young trees which we will be carving into longbows. The order of selection was based on a number draw, and I was 7 out of 8. D: But I couldn't be happier with the one I got anyway.
One of my classmates just bought a bow at Cabela's (a huge hunting/fishing supply store, they have them scattered around the country, and it is like a mecca for people into that stuff with insanely cool taxidermy*...I haven't been there yet, we may go on a field trip :D) and it's pretty sweet. The bows we're practicing with are pretty inexpensive, hard to break bows out of plastic or fiberglass or something, so that we don't fuck up a good bow during the period of time we don't know wtf we are doing. The draw-weight on these bows is like 25-30 pounds, which is pretty light.. to give some idea, minimum hunting weight in this state is 40.
The one my classmate got is 45 pounds and it's totally sweet--the way the arrow flies, how fast it goes,, and the sound it makes when it hits the target is clearly different (even though we are shooting from just like 15 feet away). Even 45 pounds is hard for us to draw, the bow's owner has a hard time drawing it back and holding it without his arm shaking, and I can barely draw it back all the way. I will have to step up to the plate though, because I want mine to be about 45 pounds so I can use it to hunt with.
Oh, and to give even MORE of an idea, and to make us sound really pathetic, I was reading about English long-bowmen, the guys who would like shoot arrows from hundreds of yards away and pierce armor, and their bows' draw weight could be like 180 pounds. WTFFFFF I don't get how that's humanly possible. Skeletons of those archers have like really deformed arms and bone spurs and stuff. Oh my god HOW.
* * * * * * * * * *
Today we also watched this insane, awesome video Frank (our instructor) had. It's like newsreel shorts from the 40s, black and white with really cheesy narration added over it. It's about these 2 brothers, the Willem brothers, who live in the Mojave desert. It starts out with them driving around their insane... car/jalopy thing, which is like a crude cart-jeep thing with an open top and zero suspension, driving it offroads, over all these ditches and uneven ground and practically bouncing out of the car.
At the bottom of the desert is this dry lakebed, and they "ski" and toboggan down the sand slopes. Sometimes they "waterski" by holding on to a rope attached to their moving car. Which then has no one in it, and is trundling merrily across the desert. So how do they stop it? They fire an arrow at like a 3-inch wide target, which hits this switch they've rigged up and cuts the ignition.
One time the guy goes to fire at the car and stop it and his bow breaks in half. Cue him throwing it down and them frantically running after the car.
Which goes over a ginormous cliff.
They get to the bottom and start it up and it still runs. :D
So yeah, it's the best video ever, and that's only the beginning. The other segments have them crawling up a cliff face in order to trap a bobcat in a net and haul it away with them (why I don't know), shooting increasingly small objects off each other's head (down to like a die and a button), shooting BLINDLY over a hill in order to hit someone's hat on a blanket (and doing it of course), shooting through rings tossed in the air and pinning them to targets, etc. Someone really really needs to put this on youtube.
The style of shooting they are doing and the style we are learning is called instinctive shooting, which means that you don't sight down the arrow or anything, you keep both eyes on the target and just... shoot it so much that you develop the hand-eye coordination to know where it's going to go, like throwing a ball. In their case EXACTLY where it's going to go, to like a square centimeter. It's awesome.
So anyway, in the afternoon we made a tincture from cedar needles, which involves shredding cedar needles, pouring in a bottle of everclear, and shaking it up and letting it sit a couple weeks.
* * * * * * * * * *
Also, here is what string slap looks like, when you don't wear an arm guard (string slap being what happens when you release the bowstring and it hits your arm as it springs forward).
So uh, I'll be better about wearing an armguard now. This is totally happening because I SAID, the other day, that I wasn't having a problem with string slap. I mean, I almost didn't BUY an armguard last night when I went to a sports store. I also bought some arrows--one of which I shot over the target deep into a brush pile, dammit--and a partial glove.
I needed a glove, because although we have some, they are all huge, and make it a lot harder for me to shoot. So I got the "youth" size one, which fit my fingers snugly.
Unfortunately, as I realized today, the wrist strap also comes down to like... the middle of my palm. So I'm gonna have to alter it. In the meantime I'm just... wrapping the strap around my palm.
Oh my god camo lingerie, wtf.
There are thongs.
And a lot of pink camo underwear. What that is supposed to blend in with I do not know.
That's all for now, folks. Next weekend is a survival skills workshop and then we're digging for razor clams.
