By Scott Bestul

All else being equal, the hunter with the most experience usually has the best shot at bagging a good buck. And when that Experience comes in the form of a great bow built by Bowtech, the odds are even better. Hurteau and I (along with test team members Will Brantley and Danny Hinton) recently put the Bowtech Experience through its paces in our annual Best of the Best bow test, and while I can’t reveal exactly where it placed in a field of hot shooters, rest assured it ranked high enough that I know this to be a very cool prize indeed.

By Dave Hurteau

I must drive marketing guys nuts. Their job is to get the hottest, newest, brand-spankinest stuff into my hands so I can be instantaneously bowled over by how wonderful it is and tell you folks all about it just before the product hits the shelves. Alas, I’m often a little slow. It sometimes takes me a while to fully grasp how I feel about this or that.

Take Bowtech’s 2012 Insanity CPXL. Last spring, I set one up, shot it a bunch, and told you all, right here, that I liked it just fine. And why not? There’s nothing not to like. Then I put the bow on the wall, where it has hung, doing exactly nothing, for about a year.  

By Scott Bestul

There’s nothing quite like the sound of a delivery truck pulling up to your driveway to drop off a new toy—specially a hunting toy that you didn’t have to pay for. Of course, I’m referring to the Bear Motive 6 compound bow, the company’s new flagship model and the prize in our first scoring contest of 2013. So without further yammering, let’s check out the actual scores of the bucks you eyeballed, and then see who guessed the best.

By Scott Bestul

It’s been a tough couple of weeks for losing legends. Only a few days after learning we’d lost our own John Merwin, I found out that Tom Jennings, member of the Archery Hall of Fame, passed away last Monday. He was 88.

An acclaimed compound-bow pioneer, Jennings was the technical editor for The Archery Magazine when Missourian W.H. Allen sent him a wheel bow to test in 1966. Allen had just applied for a patent on the product and was shopping a prototype around to several companies, but no one was interested in the odd-looking mix of limbs, strings, and cables. But when Jennings shot this early compound—a bow that was only 20 fps faster than a recurve and offered only 15 percent let-off—he realized he was holding the future. Already a custom bowyer and co-owner of S&J Archery, Jennings immediately abandoned production of recurve bows and threw himself into building and marketing a better compound.