Scienceguyorg Ramblings: Homer Valley Hawk Throwers

Wednesday, July 22, 2015

Homer Valley Hawk Throwers

I haven’t really thought about a bucket list but there are so many things I would like to try in a life time, last night I threw tomahawks with the Homer Valley Hawk Throwers. Coworker Bob has been urging me for some time that I need to come out to his little slice of heaven to try this with the group. Weather permitting this happens every Tuesday evening and is referred to as “Tomahawk Tuesday”.

The location for this on private land sandwiched between bluffs on two sides provides for amazing scenery. Bob took for me a tour in his “Dunn Buggy” of some of the property. We crossed a tiny stream of water by driving through it and then up rather steep terrain to see his tiny two-story cabin which is headquarters near the area he deer hunts in the fall. On the way back he spotted a black squirrel and a rabbit ran right in front of the buggy.

To start with I watched others throw the tomahawks and took pictures but it wasn’t long and I had a heavy hatchet in my hand to practice throwing. How the tomahawk rotates in flight and almost always connects with the blade area into the log face seems like magic to me. On some of my throws the blade would get sideways when it smacked into the log. With just a few practice throws I was entered in the contest of getting as close to a playing card stapled to the face of a log. There are two logs next to each other, one person throws on left side and the other person throws on the right. The winner is the one that has the tomahawk closest to the center of the card. I was lucky in first round and won against someone that is really good at throwing. Continuing in the contest my lack of skill was obvious but I was doing well enough that I wasn’t discouraged.

Some of the throwers were leaving but a number of us played a couple of rounds of a blackjack throwing game. Four cards were stapled to the log and the object was to slice into one of the cards. When you had thrown a slice you could pick out a card from a deck and turn it over. The first one to reach 21 was the winner.