The wind calling drill

The reason wind calling improves so slowly is that the feedback loop is broken. You miss, you correct, you hit, and you remember the hit. Nothing in that sequence records what you originally believed, so nothing tells you whether your belief was any good.

This drill fixes the loop with one rule: write the call down before the shot breaks.

What it measures

• The size of your typical wind error, in your own units.
• Whether you have a bias — consistently calling more or less wind than there is.
• Whether your error grows with wind speed, or with distance, or neither.

Setup

The drill

1. Read the wind and write down your estimateSpeed and clock position. Commit before you touch the rifle — the moment you look through the scope, you start rationalising.
2. Convert it to a hold with the solverLet the app turn your call into a windage value. This drill measures your reading, not your arithmetic.
3. Hold that value and break the shotHold, do not dial. It is faster and it is what you will do under time pressure.
4. Record where it actually landedIn the same units as your hold. 'Half a mil right' — not 'a bit right'.
5. Work out what the wind actually wasBack-calculate: what wind speed would have put the bullet where it went? That is the truth against which your call is scored.
6. Repeat twenty times, then look at the column of errorsDo not analyse mid-session. Twenty data points, then read them together.

Scoring it

Two numbers matter, and they mean different things.

Bias is the good news: it is a systematic error, and systematic errors can be corrected the moment you notice them. If twenty calls average two mph high, subtract two mph and your calls improve tonight.

Absolute error is the real skill, and it improves slowly. Tracking it across sessions is the only honest way to know whether you are getting better or simply shooting on calmer days.

Pass mark

• Bias under 1 mph across twenty calls. Anything larger is free accuracy you are throwing away.
• Absolute error under 2–3 mph in ordinary conditions. That is roughly what a good club shooter achieves.
• No growth in error with wind speed. If your calls fall apart above 12 mph, that is where to spend the next session.

Making it harder

• Switch off the wind meter. Call from vegetation and mirage alone. This is the field condition.
• Vary the distance shot to shot. Prevents you from anchoring on one remembered hold.
• Add a time limit. Thirty seconds from reading the wind to breaking the shot.
• Call for a partner. Speaking a call out loud before someone else shoots removes every opportunity to quietly revise it.

Common mistakes

• Calling after the first shot. That is spotting. Valuable, but not this.
• Recording 'a bit left'. Unquantified errors cannot be averaged, which means they cannot be improved.
• Practising only in easy wind. A steady 8 mph full-value crosswind is the least useful condition to train in.
• Ignoring spin drift. At long range an unmodelled constant offset appears in your data as a wind bias that is not really yours. See spin drift.

The app's session log lets you record the call, the hold and the result together, so a season of sessions becomes a searchable record rather than twelve loose notebooks. See logging a session.

Frequently asked