First time with clicker

On Saturday I tried using a clicker for the first time. To answer a question from my previous post, a clicker is a device that attaches to the bow (normally near the grip), under which an arrow is placed. When you pull back the string and arrow, the arrow is drawn through the clicker until you reach the stage that the arrow point passes beyond the clicker. This is when the clicker makes (you guessed it) a click. The idea behind this is to allow you to maintain a consistent draw length. See this Wiki for more information.



A clicker is useful as when you get tired you tend not to pull the string back as far as you did say at the beginning of the day. This has an affect on the power of the bow and consequently where your arrows go.

My arrows are quite long and at full draw they don’t come past the front of the bow. This means that I can’t use a conventional clicker since my bow doesn’t have the capacity for a clicker extension plate. So I had the brainwave of buying a Spigarelli which mounts behind the sight block.

My first complication came when I fitted the clicker to the bow. I use an Arten Olympic sight which means that the vertical bar that has the scale on it is mounted near the bow grip. This meant that there was not enough clearance between the scale and the clicker to adjust my sight. I overcame this by fitting a washer between the clicker and the sight block.

Of course this meant that the windage on my sight was about 5mm out, so I adjusted this accordingly.

Things didn’t get much better on the field. It was windy and we shot a Short Metric round – something that I’d not done before and had no sight marks for. At 50m I took a guess – looking at my trusty notepad I had written distance conversions, and I realised that 50m is roughly half way between 50 yards and 60 yards (two distances that I did have sight marks for). That seemed ok. I also had sight marks for 30m since this is the Frostbite round distance.

Shooting with the clicker was really different to shooting without one. I had been told previously that clickers should be used to indicate that you are at the right draw length to shoot when you are ready, and not as an audible trigger – i.e. hear the click so release immediately. Even with this in mind it is really difficult. The first few times it made me physically jump when I heard the click as I squeezed my shoulder blades to get the arrow through the clicker. It feels like the click is never going to come and then just as you’re thinking about giving up and coming down it clicks. I think it’s going to take some getting used to.

Anyway, I scored 450 – not great by any means but a second class score nonetheless.