WINNING IN THE WIND! HOW TO STAY ON TARGET WHEN IT’S RIPPING!

Hey everybody, 2025, making the shot. We're here at Total Archery Challenge, Texas, target one on the knock-on course. And this is the perfect one to lead off this series. And this is a nice shot, pushing 70 yards. Doesn't seem that tough for a tack shot, but this is Texas wind right here. We've got a right to left breeze coming across. So I'm going to make this shot and then I'm going to talk to you about all the little things that went into it. Let's take advantage of a little bit of a calm spot here. All right, just left of the 12 ring, but you can probably hear the wind right now. The wind picked up during that shot. I've got a tension release. And so that's where all these questions come in of how do you shoot a tension release in the wind or a back tension release in the wind? It's commitment. You have to commit. Right there, I had a little bit of left drift. That's cool. Like, honestly, in a hunting situation, that's still a kill shot. It's not a 12 ring, but we've got this breeze and the tack is the place to learn your ballistic. Learn how much this arrow and wind naturally is going to blow over. You know, learn what, if there's grass like that, you need to know where you can hold to where when this arrow's in the air, how far that thing's going to go over. And that comes from experience. So in this case, I was actually not aiming off the target. I was using my level a little bit. I was tipping my top limb a little bit in. So my bubble was about a quarter bubble on the left edge of my line. So I kind of canted into the wind a little bit and played a little bit of English on that shot. Now that I've made a shot like this, the next thing, if you want to learn your stuff, you can always come out to a course, maybe not an attack, but a way to learn what wind does to your arrow is go to a fixed distance. And when you have a nice steady breeze like this, aim straight up and see where that's drifting to. See where it's coming over. Because then what you can do is after the first shot, if you see you're eight inches off, now you can know, hey, pushing 70 yards, eight inches with kind of a medium breeze like this. That's what I did. So then on your next shot, try holding eight inches a little bit off and see if you can then play that drift right into the 12 ring. Not a lot going on with this shot in regards to the footing's good. There is one overhang halfway down, but I can choose where to stand next to this cone and I've eliminated that out. So to step up here, target one, first arrow of the season for me, I'm really happy with that. You got to commit to the shot in the wind. Let off that safety and just drive. I'm like, give it gas, give it gas, give it gas, commit. Now, if you get gusted off this thing, there's not much you can do about that. The best you can do is get your finger back on the safety, cancel that shot back. Waiting for a lull right now, it's howling. It wouldn't be a great time to raise up and shoot, but once it starts to settle a little bit, like right now it's already starting to settle a little bit, great time to draw back, go through that shot process.