My Epiphany - Dr. Ed Ashby and the Ranch Fairy

I have been bow hunting a long time and taken quite a bit of deer. I have had long blood trails and even lost a deer that I could not recover. I had ideas of shooting arrows through areas of deer that I was always told not to do. For instance, the quartering-to shot. I was told to never take that shot and always go behind the shoulder broadside or quartering away. Now, with the arrows I was shooting I noticed that there seemed to be something off. There were some flight issues. They weren’t always hitting straight. I was told it was my grip or form or whatever, I would go slow and concentrate on form and even got my grip to where there was no grip. I was shooting with loose fingers in a relaxed open hand. Still, something was not right. I then went to weighing every arrow to make sure each arrow was within a grain or two of each other. Then I would change the orientation of the arrows when knocked to see how they flew and mark them showing which way needed to be up when I shot them the best. Nothing worked quite right. When I shot deer I would get full pass-throughs, I wouldn’t get pass-throughs, long tracking jobs, short tracking jobs, and so. Then I accidentally discovered the Ranch Fairy while watching The Hunting Public on YouTube. I now know about bare shaft tuning, high FOC, broadhead tuning, and a new term I never heard of called “Adult Arrows”. Ranch Fairy discovered the work of Dr. Ed Ashby and brought it mainstream to YouTube in great detail. Ranch Fairy takes Dr. Ed’s 12 Arrow Penetrating Enhancing Factors and presents it in a way you can understand the information easily in his videos. Ranch Fairy teaches you to try new things to get the best out of your arrows to put an animal down as quickly and humanely as possible. It isn’t as easy as looking at a given spine chart and grabbing broadheads off the shelf and hitting the woods after some practice shots. Ranch Fairy takes heat from long-time bowhunters over his videos and he hits at the industry for their set standards, but he backs up the information he presents with actual necropsy evidence showing the damage Adult Arrows do to the quarry for a quick kill. For years I just took the advice given to me from the pro shops and I was never satisfied with how my arrows were performing. I always started trying to fix shooting form first the go-to my arrows with what I was told from the shop. Now I know and will implement this new information I found by accident to get my arrows more inline with doing what they should have been doing in the first place; putting a deer down as quickly as possible. This will take work and testing to get my rig where it needs to be but I won’t be subject to a magical arrow spine chart displayed on a countertop at my archery shop and told, “Just go use this and you’ll be fine.” I owe it to my sport and the animals I hunt to be better than that. Go check out Ranch Fairy and watch what he has to say. Keep an open mind and hear him out. The best part is that he backs up what he says about building Adult Arrows with physical evidence and not a printed-out countertop chart.