Compound interest

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/06/2017 (3291 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Cupid, draw back your bow, and… and get out of here, you little twerp.

This is compound country and the world of compound bow archery is not a world for you, little fella. Arrows from your timid wooden recurve bow may touch hearts but carbon-fibre arrows fired from the mighty aluminum laminate-composite compound will shred them — with pinpoint accuracy.

A compound bow can sizzle 29-inch arrows up to 350 feet per second (about 380 km/h). That’s not faster than a speeding bullet but much faster than a speeding Shinkansen bullet train.

Had Robin Hood been armed with these magnificent seven-pound contraptions. he would have ruled the whole of England and not just some puny patch of forest.

The recurve bow is the more notorious, being the type that appears in westerns and warriors-of-old TV shows, but the compound bow is the weapon of choice for local target shooters, says Ryan Van Berkel, executive director of the Archers and Bowhunters Association of Manitoba.

“We’ve built a very strong compound culture,” Van Berkel says. “As archers advance, they start switching form recurve to compound. Part of that is because we have a history of successful compound archers. I’d say we have a 90-to-10 ratio of compound to recurve. That’s a lot higher than the international average.”

Velocity might be sexy, but compounds are designed for ease of use and accuracy. The bull’s-eye on an archery target is roughly the size of a loonie. Variant systems of levers, pulleys, cams, criss-crossing polyurethane strings and stabilizers allow the shooter to draw the bow, with relative ease, and minimum strain on the bow’s frame, to a precise release point (the back wall) on every shot. These seemingly complex setups are baffling to the outsider but enable laser-beam accuracy in the hands of a skilled archer.

Complementing these requisite do-dads is an adjustable sight that can be tinkered with to accommodate for variables such as arrow thickness, wind and temperature. Factors as innocuous as barometric pressure can affect a shot, says Kelly Taylor, a masters category archer (50-plus), and competitive archers leave nothing to chance.

“These bows are state of the art,” says Taylor, whose son Austin is among the world’s best shooters in the cadet category (17 and under).

All this technology and engineering adds up to a price tag of roughly $2,000 for a basic bow. Start adding accoutrements and the purse strings can open to a tune of an additional $1,500.

For competitive archers, they’re worth every loonie.

darron.hargreaves@freepress.mb.ca