Class on May 26, 2012: Beautiful weather and tons of returning students; important new safety lesson

We had beautiful weather yesterday for our class.  Gerard ran the class for the two new first time students and Shabbir and Frank helped supervise the range and do setup and tear down.

The class lines up to shoot with Frank doing duties as range master.

We also adopted a new safety procedure that I doubt comes up very often, but it’s something everyone should learn.

Of course as a part of our first-time lessons, we take a great care in teaching students how to pull arrows safely.  During the demonstration there sometimes isn’t an arrow in a bale to demonstrate how to safely pull them out, so we just stick an arrow into a bale with our hands.

We forgot that aluminum arrows sometimes suffer metal fatigue, and can become brittle.  One of our instructors went to put a fatigued aluminum arrow into the bale.  The metal immediately shredded and tore up his thumb.  There was a lot of blood but no stitches.

We slightly changed our safety procedures now to include the admonition that “arrows are only supposed to be placed in a bale by a bow”.   It’s one of those “once in a lifetime” accidents that yields a useful safety lesson that might save someone a more serious injury in the future.