So while my friend and I were there, we didn't see a single traditional shooter. Very awkward, and right off the bat infuriating due to a whole bunch of factors. First target was a cheetah chasing a gazelle, which we had to wait about a half hour to shoot because of two massive groups of people with sights and binoculars (even though the distance was listed at every single shot, which seems really weird to me) were being Very Serious Shooters. So not knowing the routine much (this is our second 3-d shoot ever) we look around for the red line, saw that it was about 5 yards in front of the dark line that compounds shoot at for the most part, and I aim for the cheetah. Hit the target, but not the vitals, and the arrow does this crazy spinning deflection. I think that's pretty weird, but it's even weirder when the same thing happens with the gazelle, but this time the arrow goes flying into the woods from the deflection. When we go up to retrieve arrows, we poke at the targets to find they're some sort of hard plastic, completely unlike the targets we shot at the other 3-d shoot. I see the one arrow I can find is broken right behind where the field point was, the other arrow is off in the trees somewhere and there's people behind us waiting so we hustle out. That rattled me pretty bad I guess, because the rest of the shoot was a disaster, with the exception of a smallish frog target that I bullseyed.
If it was just me then I'd have chalked it up to me having the worst shoot of my life for whatever reason, but my friend wound up having the same problems on the same targets that I was, and Every Single Target had zero natural backstop, unless you count tall weeds, thorny plants, and dense tall grass a backstop. On top of that people were kinda rude when we asked politely to play through since it was just the two of us. Don't know if that's considered gauche, but on the scoring ticket it said to let faster parties go ahead so we thought it would be ok. In the end I wound up destroying/losing all five of my arrows (again, at the first 3-d shoot we did I lost zero arrows and pretty much used the same one over and over or two arrows in the case of multiple targets, so I thought I would be fine) and my friend lost/broke most of hers as well. What's galling is that I KNOW we're not bad shots, we routinely peg 2" foam balls that are thrown on the ground at around 20 yards, but then again a lot of the targets were at 24 yards even for traditional gear. Maybe if we had caught up to a group of been-there-done-that traditional folk we wouldn't have felt like we were getting stared at the entire time, or maybe it's just because we were such awful shots that day. We didn't even complete the course, and did the walk of shame out of there. The only thing I can say that was positive is that we got a bit of exercise in walking around and shooting, and found that even after a wretched shoot we can still be civil to each other on a two-hour+ car ride.
