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 Ready for indoor season? We went hunting again. Normally, some of us are preparing at the last minute, but not this year. It seems everyone was prepared well in advance. Broadheads were flying good, bows were in good repair, hopes were high, and we were prepared to deal with a lot of meat. For a long time now, we have been going hunting on the opening day of Oregon’s general bowhunting season. For ten days, we camp and hunt on public land. This is before the elk are in the rut and before kids have to be back in school. Sometimes the elk are hard to locate, because they aren’t bugling at this time. However, this year when we arrived at our camping spot, there was fresh elk sign everywhere. No one had a hard time getting out of bed opening day. Seven of us hit the woods before sun up. By sundown, everyone had seen more fresh sign, but no elk. We have always found elk in our hunting area. The trick, however, is to see them first and sneak up on them. We’re pretty good at this, but not good enough to be very picky about whether it is a cow or a bull. The first thing we sneak up on is fair game, and we make every effort to put it in the freezer. We do appreciate the elk meat. After four days of scouring all the areas that we were familiar with, it was obvious that there wasn’t any elk in the area. The fresh sign we had seen was now old sign. We saw a few elk, but they were over ninety yards away, and seemed to be leaving the area. (We shoot pretty good, but not that good.) One encounter was with half an elk. That is, all the hunter saw was the back half of an elk at about twenty yards. The youngest hunter in our group, found that if you whistle at a bear, the bear will not stop and give you a better shot (as seen on T.V.) but will leave immediately. Two of us decided to check out some new territory and found quite a few elk. In particular a cow elk, which is now in the freezer. However, when the rest of us went to the new area, the elk were gone. After three more days of not seeing any elk or fresh sign, we decided to go home. There just didn’t seem any point in hanging around. We had covered a lot of area with little to show for it. Hunting close to home on the weekends didn’t prove to be any better. The season is now closed. Maybe, next year will be better. However, it was nice to escape into the woods again. We all enjoy shooting our bows. Now is the time to try new ideas, and get prepared for the indoor shooting season. A few of us have even admitted that we like tournament shooting and playing with our equipment almost as much as we enjoy hunting. Shooting competitively is challenging just like hunting, only different. Hunting season, for some of us is the least amount of shooting we do all year. One of the new ideas was to try some fat carbon shafts. Last year we used fat aluminum 2613 shafts (full length with heavy points). They worked well and our scores increased. However, many times just before an important shoot, we put the bow on the shooting machine and found that after some use, they did not group very well, the arrows had changed. Most of the arrows could be fixed by indexing the nock, but a few had to be straightened. We figured that the inconsistencies were the result of the arrow being shot into hard bales. (The shock led to the bending of them.) We think that maybe carbon arrows won’t bend as much, giving us longer consistency. The first thing we discovered was that the “magic bow” we’d found was not so magic anymore. The fantastically straight nock travel that it once had, was gone. Fact is, the bow was pretty bad. We got some improvement by fixing worn cam bushings and making the limbs snug in the limb pockets. It wasn’t perfect anymore, but it was pretty good. We put high helical 5” fletches on six of the arrows with 140 grain points. We shot six of them on the shooting machine, and got a group about the size of a tennis ball. Then, we shot six unfletched arrows and got a group the size of a paper plate. The bare shafts were very sensitive to how the nock was oriented. That is, if we rotated the nock in the shaft the arrow would hit in a different place. (As much as 8” different.) Our best bare shaft hit just to the right of the fletched arrow. So, we decide to shorten the arrows and see what would happen. We started shortening the arrows one inch at a time in hopes to bring the two impact points together. When we were done, we had shortened the arrows six inches. Our best bare shaft (the one least sensitive to nock orientation) hit about one inch above the fletched arrow. The six bare shafts had a group about the size of a softball. The six fletched shafts were tweaked down from a “tennis ball size group” to the size of a nickel by indexing the nocks to different vanes and replacing some bad nocks. With this all done, the shooter was able to shoot the best bare shaft into the X-ring at 20 yards, with the same bow that with 2613’s he was able to shoot a perfect 300 at Vegas. We are going to see if the carbon arrows make any difference. We’ll let you know! Visit Spot-Hogg Archery |
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