My New Bow

I'm starting to take archery seriously. After a year as a novice at the University of Toronto's Hart House Archery Club, I decided to get my own equipment. This week, I drove all the way to Waterloo to visit The Bow Shop, Canada's premiere archery store. There, I picked up a Chek-Mate Falcon traditional recurve bow with a 34 lb draw weight (at 28") for $319. Along with carbon fibre arrows and other accessories, the total came to $491.68 Canadian, tax included.

The bow is a traditional recurve. I could’ve gone for a longbow but, frankly, I don’t like the handle grip in longbows. When choosing a bow, the handle is THE most important criterion because if you don’t like how it FEELS, you’ll never want to use the bow.

I’m a traditional archer, that is to say, unlike Olympic archers and most other archers in the world today, I do not use a sight device on the bow for aiming. Like Robbing Hood and William Tell, I essentially “wing it” with my naked eyeball. (This is also called “instinctive” archery.)