RE: How many air-balls?
Oh god. Dozens. Dozens and Dozens.
When we first started hunting, we were using freebie arrows that we dug up behind the targets at a local sportsmens club over the summer. Nothing matched. We bummed rusty old used broadheads from anyone we knew who had a bow. So, we stuffed our quivers with whatever we could come up with and went hunting.
We had junk bows, junk arrows, junk broadheads - and we made due.
We had no clue about stand placement, shot selection, ethics, bloodhounding, shot placement, etc... We just hunted. Willy Nilly.
13, 14 years old - out there with no adult supervision - 100% self-taught. See,my parents weren't exactly "thrilled" that I was running around the woodslike a wild redneck (instead of studying), so they weren't exactly thrilled about supporting my bowhunting habit, from a financial perspective. I had a couple grass-cutting jobs, (which helped), but I spent the dough on girls and the remainder onbowhunting gear. There was no free lunch for this guy. In PA you're supposed to be "supervised." I was supervised allright - supervised walking out the door, and supervised when I walked back in.
Young and stupid. We're lucky we didn't kill ourselves.
Honest to god, there were years where IknowI'd bust up 20+ junker arrows over the course of a season, just to kill 2 measly deer. As honest as I'm sitting here - if I could see the deer, I was shooting at it. I didn't care if it was 120 yards away.
I don't know if I'm the only kid who hunted that way... Or if I'm just the only one willing to admit it.... But that's what we did, and how we went about it. Just learning on the fly and driven by the sheer desire to show the world that we could do it. And in all honesty, I had a lot more fun hunting then than I do now. Now, I'm only happy when I succeed. Then, I was happy just to be trying.