It might sound all-too-simple, but a batch of new arrows is something that gets my heart racing. It’s almost like I’m 9 years old again, and it’s Christmas … or maybe just the middle of summer and there’s literally nothing else to do but fling sticks at a paper target tacked to a couple of stacked haybales.

James Easton made the first aluminum arrows in the U.S. in 1939. Fifty-three years later, I used the same XX75/2317 shown in the photo on this page to bag my first archery buck. However, my fascination with arrows started long before that.

It was probably sometime in 1978 when I became infatuated with the mystical flight of the arrow. My older brothers — who had shot recurves and cedar arrows for years leading up to that point — took the dive into compound bows. New bows meant new arrows, and those first aluminum shafts they brought home were almost magical — burnt orange anodized finish and donning gorgeous turkey-feather vanes. For this little kid, it was space-age stuff. Metal arrows! That flew straight and hit a paper plate almost every time at 20 yards. Unheard of!

The arrows I shoot today are quite different from those thick (0.369”), heavy (13.3 GPI) XX75/2317 shafts I bought new in 1989, but truth be told, “dead is dead” when it comes to bowhunting, and I’m really not that much more accurate at 25 yards now than I was back then. That’s probably because those engineers got it right the first time. Heck, they were producing shafts with a straightness of .002 way back in the 1960s (and improved that to .0015 when they came out with the high-end XX78 about a decade later).

The new Whiteout arrows (above) I’ll be shooting this fall are extremely light (8.1 GPI) and smaller (0.294 OD), but I’d say the main difference is the rest of my equipment has finally caught up to arrow technology. That means I can shoot farther and faster when chasing whitetails, hogs, turkeys and other game with my Mathews V3. But that’s all relative, too, because I’ve seldom unleashed a shot at an animal that’s beyond 40 yards, anyway.

I sometimes wonder if I’ll sit back a decade from now and marvel at the arrows I shot in this modern era. 

Yeah, that’s a silly question. For me, archery is a sentimental journey. The gear might change over the years, but the memories attached to those tools are what make the journey so blissfully beautiful.