Wednesday, 22-April-2026

Hot on the heels of throwing axes, I went back to my roots with a wee bit of archery.

I’ve shot bows for so long… even making my own (very rough) bows when I was young. Something about wanting to be Robin Hood, or one of the characters from the Redwall series maybe?

<Okay, I actually stopped writing this for like 30min while I researched Redwall, just to see what’s actually happened with it. I mean, I read ALL the books when I was younger, and it turns out that a few new ones have been released! I may have to track them down, now… especially since it turns out that the author hasn’t been accused of anything horrible! Which is kind of miraculous, these days. Anyways, back to your regularly scheduled blog post>

The core here is that I enjoy archery, and I’ve wanted to try it out here in Ireland for a while. The problem has been that it’s a circular requirements loop – “You can’t shoot at an archery range unless you have a permit”, followed by, “You have to shoot at an archery range to apply to get a permit”. I finally got sick of it, called them, said I knew what I was doing and that I “had a permit from a previous club in the United States”. Which is technically true, since I’ve shot at a ton of clubs in the USA after going through their quick safety briefing.

Well, it worked. A good reminder that trying to follow detailed rules is silly, and that just reaching out to the club is the right way to deal with things around here.

I went, I mentioned the person I’d spoken with, people had never heard from them, I said “that’s fine, I know what I’m doing just give me a bow”, they looked unconvinced, I stayed quiet until they gave me a bow, and then I safely shot arrows at targets. I mean, it’s not rocket science, and once I was able to start shooting everything went beautifully smoothly.

I chatted with people, got some interesting advice from a former Olympian, tried it out, decided that I preferred my own style of shooting (with no offence to those standards, I’m sure that technique was the best back when it was originally taught), and I had a grand old time.