Aiming Off

Frame modified for extremely windy conditions add wheels and we could race them!

Now that we are moving back into the great outdoors, we should probably have a chat (or 10) about how the Scottish weather affects your archery. We'll definitely have a few chats about water over our "summer" but today let’s look at a weather condition that makes shootie tricky ... wind! Wind is a nightmare for archers because it’s not a constant nor are its effects consistent either. Wind can come at you from any direction (a bit like Glasgow traffic), vary in strength, vary over the distance between you and your boss and change both direction and strength in a second. It can be a real puzzle to solve and even internationalists can find themselves battling this weather feature. So to keep things bite sized, let’s start with wind that’s forcing your arrows left and right.

First if all you need to know where the wind is coming from. We do this by putting small flags on top of the bosses. These show you what’s happening at the target. Gauge the wind strength by watching how much the flag is moving. Now if it’s a gentle breeze or a fairly constant wind, moving your sight pin in or out can push your arrows back into the centre. This feature on your sight is called windage** and can be useful in a light constant breeze. But what to do about a strong gusting wind? You can't really adjust your sight pin to deal with a gusting wind.

In competitions, due to time limits, you can’t always wait for the wind to subside before getting your shot off so here we use a technique called Aiming Off. This is effectively allowing for how far the wind will blow your arrow out of the gold by aiming an equal distance on the opposite side of the gold and allowing the wind to blow your arrow back into the middle. Now obviously this can be quite tricky to get right. You have to shoot while the wind is blowing, you have to predict how much that wind will push your arrows out of the gold and then you have to aim that amount on the other side of the gold. If the wind drops while you are aiming off, then your arrow will hit where you aimed. If it gusts worse while the arrow is in the air, your arrow will still be blown out of the gold although not as badly as it would otherwise. Final issue is you have to aim without the benefit of having gold in your sight pin but at least the target is graduated for you to use the various colours as aiming points.

Your thought process for an Aiming Off situation might be ... Conditions: aiming at the middle, strong gusting wind (lets call that strength 5) blows arrow into black on left hand side ... Adjustment: while wind gusting like that, aim at black on the right-hand side.

A perfect X in extremely blustery conditions ... but where are the other 5?

Aiming off does have the advantage that if the wind suddenly drops, you can instantly get the pin back into the middle and shoot normally. You can also dynamically adjust how far you aim off depending on the severity of the wind at that second. You are now creating new reference points on the fly. Again, the colour bands on the faces give you good points of reference. If brutal gusts mean you are aiming at the black, a lessor gust (lets call that strength 3) might mean aiming at the red. It’s all about your judgement and experience gained over time in the field. A small notebook can be useful for keeping track of these ad hoc sight marks as well as other useful reminders. Something to consider as its a really useful thing to have. These sorts of insights highlight your development as an archer ... it’s not all badges and shiny things you know! ;o)

It should be noted that if you are aiming at target 1 or target 3 while you are actually shooting on target 2, its likely we'll cancel shooting as that’s a bit too windy for safety ... although some of our more experienced archers have done just this. Feel free to ask them about their Matrix moments in competitions!

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**On bow sights, windage moves the pin left or right. Elevation slides the pin up or down.