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in reply to: Wild Voices #39297
There is a bird up here in north QLD called a Bush Stone Curlew. Ecologically analogous to the roadrunner apparently. Long, skinny legs with a sleek running bird’s body and a pair of huge, soul searing yellow eyes. During the day they sit around determinedly (suicidally) using the ‘freeze’ technique to avoid predation. But when the sun goes down they sing to one another one of the most haunting songs I’ve heard in the wild.
Here is an audio sample:
Trust me, if you’ve had one bore into your soul with those eyes during the day, then hear that out in the lonely scrub, it can be a special sound.
The first animal I ever killed with a bow and arrow was a duck. I kept one of her feathers which I tied to my bow to honour her and remind me of how bad I felt killing her (it should have been a clue that I would end up trad, that I was tying a feather to my compound bow when my friends were attaching pin sights and stabilizers). I’d like to do the same with my longbow. Hopefully it’s first kill will be a bunny or a fox or something… I don’t want a pigs foot hanging off my bow 😕 😉
I always take wise old crow as a good omen. If he’s hanging around he must be optimistic for me. Or he thinks I’m so dumb I’ll break my leg and he can peck out my eyeballs 😆
in reply to: Bear Scouting Pics #39117Great photos!
in reply to: Sitka spruce and EFOC, failed experiment #39116Keep us updated with your progress either way Dave. I’ve had the same breakage on SS when they hit something hard(ish). I’ve given some local hardwoods a go, but yes, they are heavy as all get out. My only hopes for trad FOC are Kev’s leopardwoods (maybe getting an intentionally underspined but light shaft and building out the strike plate) or bamboo.
in reply to: Hunting canoe #36729Cheers for all the insights guys, please keep them coming. I suppose another requirement is for it to be to some degree man portable. Waterways up here are seasonal, so in the wet they may be wide, deep and swift, but now in the dry they are shallow, slow and intermittent to the point where continuing by boat would require dragging or carrying it a ways.
Oh and while I’ve never been in a canoe, I have spent some time on surf skis and sea kayaks. I’m no expert but I can get about.
handirifle wrote: Having used a canoe quite a bit, I can tell you I would not want to use one in big croc country.
haha, a tippy canoe beats the hell out of my current solution, which is to find a narrow part of a creek with a sandbar and wading across as quick as possible 😉
in reply to: What happens to your string at release #36488That girl’s bow arm is made of stone!
in reply to: Orion Rising!! #35537Ralph, that was perfect mate! Who wrote it and what’s it from?
Mike, it’s a different era now my friend! I got qualified this year how to teach guys to use our fancy new hand held GPS and have company staff trying to book their guys in for the 3 day course (in barracks), but I can’t book time to take fellas out for a few days and do some map/compass navigation exercises. Great stuff.
in reply to: Treed Partridges and trail cams #35473MathewC wrote: Is it possible that we as a species can get so efficient at killing that the animals can’t survive?
I think we as a species have become so efficient at living that the animals can’t survive. I reckon that’s a scarier thought. Subdivisions and golf courses have claimed a lot more wilderness than even the biggest jerks of the hunting world I imagine. Although someone’s pet dog was killed by a pack of wild dogs on a golf course up here recently. Sometimes nature bites back.
in reply to: Cougar tips? #35426Any progress here Shane? The only predator I’ve ever hunted was a fox that outfoxed me at every turn. I’m pretty intrigued by predator hunting, I guess because I’ve never properly done it or seen it done. Keep us updated 😀
Jim
PS
Has anyone ever tried calling in a lion? I’ve only ever read of them being bowhunted with dogs.
in reply to: Orion Rising!! #35195Dave, if you aren’t getting up before dawn you aren’t an old man yet 😉
Ralph, I figure I’m a bit like you, I’m heavenly illiterate (the first time I was in the US I spent a while looking for the southern cross before someone told me you can’t see it there!). My wife, who is considerably better educated and smarter than me, is a bit of an enthusiast and downloaded a really cool app on her iphone (I forget what it’s called). It figures out where you are then you just hold your phone up to the sky and it shows you the stars and constellations where you’re pointing the phone. You can sweep it across the sky and the phone keeps up, showing everything there. It’s a pretty neat educational tool for a dunce like me 😀
Some fellas can navigate to a pretty decent standard off celestial nav, which is about as trad as it gets and blows my little mind.
Jim
PS
Ralph, yes I am with about watching the sunrise… that transition from sitting in the cold dark, to first light on the horizon, it’s soul lifting.
in reply to: Help my poor shoulder please! #34179Seabass wrote: Thanks Jim. The pain is (or seems to be) right inside the joint itself. In that little hollow of the shoulder when raised.
If that is the case I would definitely stop shooting till the pain settles. What Matt said above is right as well, there is value in treating shooting a bow like any other resistance exercise. Perform a small number of good form, focused repititions, have a rest for a few minutes, do another set, rest, do a set then don’t do it again for another couple of days.
Your shoulder works in funny little ways shooting a bow. When I first started shooting recurves I was doing sets of 10 over grasp heaves with a 45lb weight hanging off me (I weigh about 200lbs), 100lb dumb bell rows etc, I still started with a 35# bow. I know it’s hard to resist shooting heaps when you’re trying to develop a skill, but you need to give your body the chance to develop as well.
There’s a story about an ancient Greek wrestler who one day got a calf. He carried the calf where ever he went on his shoulders. No big deal. The calf grew every day and the wrestler never noticed that she was getting heavier. Before he knew it he was carrying around a cow on his shoulders and he was the strongest man in Greece.
A tall tale for sure, but the point is, incremental increases in load over an extended period is the way to go 😉
I know a really neat, light weight exercise to strengthen and gain range of motion in your shoulders as well, but it’s hard to describe. I’ll see if I can find a youtube video and post it.
But seriously, when it’s not muscular pain, I’d just stop and rest the joint.
Jim
in reply to: Help my poor shoulder please! #33991Welcome here Seabass 😀 Sorry to hear you’re having shoulder trouble. My first bit of advice would be that if your shoulder hurts stop shooting till the pain stops. You can use ice and anti-inflammatory’s to assist in that. I’d encourage you to go see a sports doc or physiotherapist. Where is the pain? In the front towards your chest? Round back near the shoulder blade? Or on the outside? And is it muscular or deeper internal pain?
A couple of things spring to mind though. A lot of military guys have a chest/back imbalance (because of all the push ups) that make a shoulder behave unhappily. If you can do 60 push ups but can’t do 10 overgrasp chin ups your chest is probably overdeveloped in relation to your back. If that is the case further developing your back will be beneficial. Overgrasp chin ups and any kind of rows are a good place to start. Again, I wouldn’t do anything till the pain has gone away.
As a final thought, I’ve had shoulder trouble on my string arm before which a rotational draw has more or less eliminated. Moebow has a good youtube video demonstrating this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6c8_-96h6BY
I’m not a doc or medic or anything though mate, so take all that for what it’s worth. If you keep getting trouble I’d be hitting up a doc or physio.
Jim
in reply to: Does not a heavy point make FOC? #33469Kev, there are a few points I can think of that may be relevant here. But everything I’m about to write is all about stuff I’ve read, not from experience, so take that for what it’s worth 😉
First, if there is a substantial weight advantage to a tapered 11/32 vs a 5/16 hardwood of the same spine, that would be worth chasing. I don’t know if there is, my experience with wood is so limited.
Second, in the FOC seminar I’ve seen on youtube, Doc Ashby reckons all else being equal, tapered shafts get 8% better penetration than parallel. What penetration difference is there in 11/32 vs 5/16? I don’t know, but if it is less than or equal to 8%, 11/32 tapered is better, or at least on par.
Third, supporting your suggestion to use hard wood, is Doc Ashby’s 1st and most important point in that same seminar (and I’ve seen him say it here as well) is that “Structural Integrity of the entire arrow system is THE most important factor in terminal arrow performance. When structural integrity fails nothing else about your arrow’s design matters.” In the seminar he went on to say that the easy stand out for this is the hardwood shaft. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but it was something like 1 in 3 Al and C arrows mechanically failed on heavy bone strike, where something like 1 in 30 hardwood shafts failed.
The good Doc et al more or less gave us the specs for the best broadhead design, which Joe went and built, so an interesting follow up study would be to do some similar testing with the Tuffhead as the constant of the experiment and make everything else the variable. We know what the best head is, is there a best shaft to go behind it? If there is, what is it?
Jim
in reply to: Organized work area? #33358Here’s my workbench, I had to make myself to fit the specs I needed (really tall so the little bandits that share my home can’t reach the dangerous things, and really narrow so that I can pull my car right up to it in the garage)…
You can see my ‘mini-table’ on the tall bench but here’s a close up. Also my little boxes of sharpening and sharp bits. That’s the box the KME came in, which is great. The tuffheads are in an old blues harp case, almost a perfect fit 😉
Multi-purpose power cage/dipping/drying station 😆
in reply to: 300 gr. blunts? #33007Dave, another option you could try is fitting a rubber blunt over a glue on blunt for a combined 300 grains. I have been using some of the bunny buster rubber blunts from 3rivers. The 11/32’s weigh in at around 115-120 grains. They have quite a bit of uneccessary ‘sleeve’ that fits over the shaft that you can cut off with scissors to reduce their weight. They shoot as straight as I do and I haven’t broken one yet (I have broken a few shafts they’re attached to though 😆 )
I doubt they’d work with the 225gn hex head, but if you could source some regular steel blunts in the 180-200gn range with the rubber blunts over top you’d be set.
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