I'll be doing some creep tuning eventually but first I have a bad case of TP that needs to be squashed before baselines can be established. I shot the other night and for the life of me could not float my pin over the spot. I could only hold directly below the dot. Now I'm always holding low. I've also got a big problem with punching my release. I picked up a truefire hardcore 4 finger revolution a while back and am going to try and teach myself to shoot it with back tension and do a bunch of blind bale shooting at home. My wrist strap release is a truefire hardcore fold back that I love but I can't seem to stop punching it.
Oh Man! I'm sorry to hear about that. It's an ailment you can work through, but if you are like me you will never again be able to relax and shoot a bow again. For me it only goes away if I'm shooting at animals further than 40 yards. Terrible affliction
After my big nationwide tour I came back almost ready to quite shooting the bow. Went from a normal 3rdish place in tournaments to being lastish in one year. Gave up competitive shooting all together. Which was fine, I never was going to be a Terry Ragsdale anyway
The worst part was I was missing animals. I had hunted ten states and missed animals in all but one. And of course the bigger the animal the worse I missed
Something major needed to be done!
Duke Savora talked me into going to Tempe, AZ and work with Al Hendersen
(US Olympic Archery Coach). First thing coach asked me when he saw my bow was, "What weight and draw are you shooting?" When I told him 31"/80# he took my bow over to the trash can and threw it in. Walks back over, grabs my finger glove and throws that in the trash too! We dug them out after awhile, but he made his point. Later he asked why I was shooting a 31" draw length. When I told him that was the only way I could get my bow to 80# he says, "I'm not sure I'm going to be able to help you with this mess you built..."
I'm not sure what the name of the shop was there, but Desert Archery sounds about right. Good enough for the story anyway. So we go into Desert Archery and get me measured at 28.5" draw length. Get a PSE Laser set up at 55#. And get me a Wilson tab. We also get a Check-it sight and remove the pin. Replace it with a pin that has a brass washer soldered to the end...No aiming dot!! Also get some sight black and make the washer flat black. We also put a clicker on the bow. Grabbed a few of those as I was told I'd probably shoot a few of them off the bow. He was right! I think I screwed up at least a half dozen. Years later I found one called a "Klickety Klick" that I couldn't ruin. Not a very good clicker, but good enough for working on target panic. Believe you can still get those through Lancaster.
At the range I shot a while with sunglasses on. Lenses were frosted so I could not see detail at all. All I could see through the hole in the washer was color. When the entire hole was yellow I would extend through the clicker using back tension and then release. Shot some of the best groups of my life that first day. And ruined a good number of XX75 golds. Desert Archery was making a killing off of me
After four or five days with Coach I headed back to Oregon to work on things alone. But, after only a month things were getting bad again and I made one more trip to AZ for a good buck kicking. Was years before I started using pins again. And by that time I actually shot cross hairs which didn't seem nearly as bad. I still shoot an aperture with a ring much better than I do a pin. Especially when shooting a Vegas face where all I have to do is shoot by color.
These days I spend a full month shooting at close distance before season using a back tension release and a Check-It drop pin with the pin nocked out. I shoot at HUGE spots and work on form and follow through more than sighting. My release of choice for doing this is the Carter Attraction. I start off using it as a true tension release and then switch to using it as a back tension/pinky release. Everything goes back to the basics I learned from Coach. Of course I have modified a few things to better fit with our modern equipment. But the steps pretty much stay the same.
About ten years ago I started struggling really bad. I'd work on the basics over and over and over. Started thinking it was time to hang it up. The wife and I went from an 18" tv, to a 30" tv, to a 46" tv and then a 56" tv and I started thinking that maybe my eyes might have something to do with it. Duh!!
With a lot of special angry squaw talk she finally talked me into going to see the witch doctor and I came home a much more mature man with four eyes. Been shooting great ever since and my target panic is really well under control. Unless I just jinxed myself.
This thread is meant to be about little things. Believe me when I tell you over coming target panic
IS NOT a little thing!! Perhaps after I'm done with this I'll start a whole new thread dealing with target panic and step by step ways to attack it and keep it under control. Hopefully there were some little things in the above story that will help until then. Now go get your eyes checked!!