From Windsor (the town with the castle) last week, Saturday saw me attempting my first Windsor round. This is by far the longest round I have yet attempted, with three dozen arrows each at 60yds, 50yds and 40yds; 108 in all. I was back to using 24lb limbs, having received my replacements from Archery World on Friday (I cannot fault their customer service and quick turn-around) so I decided to attempt the full distance rather than the lesser Short Windsor. These replacement limbs are definitely a looser fit in the riser compared to the cracked pair I returned, and are much easier to insert - more like the pair I had borrowed - so I suspect that there was some problem with tolerances on the original pair. For the last couple of shoots I have been using one of the club's long rod stabilizers and decided to go with the same one again, but did change to a longer one mid-round.
Once again I did not have sight marks for 60yds with my bow in its current configuration, so I had to make an educated guess from previous figures. What I was fairly confident of was that the sight needed to be fairly close to the riser otherwise I would run out of downward adjustment, so I used the second hole from the front. At shorter distances I can get away with using the third hole and, as I go up in draw weight I expect to be able to move the sight further from the riser to improve accuracy.
The first couple of sighters allowed me to adjust my sight sufficiently to hit the boss and the remainder used to do some fine tuning. At 60yds the variations in my technique seem to be more significant than any changes in sight adjustment so I left the vertical adjustment well alone. However, I did need to adjust the left/right position of the sight pin to bring the arrows in from the left.
The three dozen at 60yds went fairly well, considering that I had only attempted this distance a couple of times before, with an equal number of hits and misses. However, I totally lacked consistency with scores for each dozen being 24, 41 then 10. The change of distance to 50yds and the lack of an existing sight mark certainly had an effect with the first half dozen scoring only 26. I did manage to pull myself up somewhat later in the round with the second and third dozens scoring 64 then 46. My performance at 40yds was not really much better than 50yds, despite the change in distance, with the last three dozen scoring 46, 62 and 53, respectively. My final score of 372 has a handicap equivalent of 67, which is above my PB, but not totally out of the ball-park.
The word which comes very much to mind with this round is 'consistency' (or, more correctly inconsistency). Given that I have only been shooting for a few weeks, perhaps I shouldn't be too hard on myself, but I need to improve my repeatability and consistency now that I have a fairly settled equipment set-up. (I have a long-rod stabilizer on order, but that should hopefully improve rather than reduce the situation). On a more positive note, I did post a couple of decent dozens at 60yds and 50yds so I just need to reproduce this a little more often - and perhaps not change the equipment mid-round!
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