Very recently a good friend of mine introduced me to his hobby (or rather his way of life), traditional instinctive archery, which is mainly about skill and not equipment (and is really cool!). I shoot instinctively, which means I don’t aim, I just draw my bow and shoot at the target. It’s fast “hunting style” shooting (it has nothing to do with Olympic archery) and requires a lot of practice to build ‘muscle memory’ but when you start hitting your targets… man, what a feeling!!! Google ‘instinctive archery’ to find out more. Of course there is a loooong way for me to go to be able to shoot a 4 inch target disc in the air (!), at 20 yards, with 10 out of 10 consistency but it’s certainly possible! Anyway, it’s just a lot of fun for me!

So here’s my archery loadout when I go to the field for target practice or to the forest for couple of hours of stumps shooting fun. My pack of choice is the Mystery Ranch ‘1-Day Assault Pack’ which is a limited variant of ASAP pack. With help of Mystery Ranch ‘Stick-it’ beaver-tail style pouch, I put my bow and quiver on the pack and walk to the safe archery range. And I put Prometheus Design Werx patch on it, yeah! And here’s what I carry:

Outside the pack:

• Bow: Samick Lion – field & hunting traditional recurve bow (60 inch long)
• Arrows: Easton Camo Hunter with natural feather fletching, field points for target practice, judo-point for stumping
• Quiver: traditional leather locally made quiver
• Knife: Chris Reeve ‘Impofu’ limited edition bush chopper in 3V tool steel (awesome when I have to retrieve stuck arrows from hardwood stumps)

Inside the pack:

• Fjallraven Skog flannel shirt… autumn is coming
• Mystery Ranch IFAK trauma kit – well, you never know!
• Hestra working gloves – a must in the outdoors
• Outdoor Research Hellium II – rain jacket is a must in autumn
• GSI soft bottle 0.7 liter water inside
• Hill People Gear cap, I just like it a lot
• Customized Ti Victorinox Farmer customized by ALM – Titanium Victorinox, nuff said 🙂
• Ping bottle opener by Vox Knives (just for fun)
• Bowstring wax
• Archery 3-fingers glove