The Bridge: Outshooting my Equipment

After the tournament, scheduling conflicts and an extended west coast vacation kept me away from Archery USA for over a month. I took my bow home for the first time, and did some shooting at Pacifica Archery in Daly City. On my return to Boston, I went back out to Dedham. I was still working on improving my scores, trying to get up to a 250/500. I did make it to a 230, but seemed to plateau in the 210s-220s. I switched to a 3-spot Vegas round target for a while to try to get myself out of my comfort zone, but as 2008 started, I found myself needed to get back to basics and work on all the little details about my form.

For quite some time, I had been hoping that I could get a new set of equipment. My initial thought was to get the ultralight Fiberbow, and the tentative plan was to make it a graduation present to myself in May 2009. My frustration mounted over the course of a few months as no matter what I did to improve, my scores had leveled off. Not that there was any way I could afford the kind of set I really wanted, I started talking to Anthony about my problem, and his comment was that I had started outshooting my bow. The inconsistency of the Samick Mizar, good as it was as an entry level piece of equipment, was not appropriate to the level of archer that my constant practice had helped me rise to.

One day, Anthony was telling a story about this amazing bow he once had, a Yamaha Eolla that was so perfectly tuned with the stabilizer that the vibrations were completely absorbed and the shot was dead silent. I asked him what was the equivalent (or as close as you could come) to the Eolla today, and his answer was the Inno, by Win and Win, one of the top archery companies in the world. I asked him to compare the Inno to the Fiberbow, without a second thought, his told me there was just no comparison. When I got home, I did a little research on my own, and decided that, if I could find a way to pull together the funding, the Inno was the way to go.

The next week, I asked Anthony what kind of money I was really talking about, so he put together a very unofficial quote for everything that I wanted, which was essentially an entirely new set of archery equipment, with the exception of a quiver, as I had grown quite fond of the one I picked up at AIM.