J the Archer

This week has been quite busy and exhausting for me, and extremely stressful for J, but we're finding good things to be happy about, and doing well overall.

On Saturday, we decided to drive the three hours to Hamilton to go to the archery store there. J has decided that he'd like to try using a compound bow and do some shooting in the afternoons after work, to de-stress. Unfortunately, there aren't any archery stores closer to us, but fortunately, we've been meaning to make a trip to Hamilton for a while, so we decided to make a weekend of it. We went to the archery store, the gardens, the lake, and the zoo, ate at some good restaurants, and relaxed at a comfortable hotel, so it was a great trip. I'll put up pictures of the other parts over the next few weeks.

This is J with his brand-new compound bow, and the nice man who helped him get it fitted/set properly and taught him some technique (although he said he had perfect form already).

I don't know anything about archery, but that looks like good form to me.

J's bow has 50lbs of pressure on it, which is apparently a lot, and they struggled to get the arrows back out of the targets, because they sank in so far.

Unfortunately, just one time he forgot to rotate his elbow, and he hit his arm with the string. I should have been a better blogger and taken a picture right after it happened when it was more exciting colours, but it didn't occur to me. Maybe next time.

There is an archery range in New Plymouth that J will check out soon. I've heard good things, so hopefully he likes it. He is currently working 6:00am to 2:30pm, so he has plenty of time in the afternoons to go and do some shooting and de-stress. He used to really enjoy doing that with his recurve bow, and he thinks it will be even better with a compound. We'll see how it goes!