Outdoor Underground Presents...

HARTFORD, CT — Can one website be all things to all hunters?  Some fans of The Leatherwall, a message board maintained by the popular traditional bowhunting website The Stickbow seem to think so.

    “My wife has informed me that I spend way too much time thinking about myself and not enough time putting my family first.  I cannot continue to read this forum and participate in the banter when I know that I cannot go afield when I wish within reasonable limits,” says Lee Wilkins, a Florida man who announced he was “signing off for a while” this week as a frequent poster to the cyber community of longbow and recurve shooting enthusiasts. Logging over 50 posts to the message board since September and untold hours spent “lurking” on “The Wall,” Wilkins also estimates he spent exactly “115 cumulative hours away from home” on three different occasions.

    “Not in the field mind you,” he writes, “but away from my house for a total of 4.79 days on 3 occasions combined.  This apparently is way too f—ing [sic] time consuming.  This will either end with an unlikely resolution, me being reduced to a miserable sheep for the rest of my life or a divorce.  If it wasn’t [sic] for my two beautiful boys ages eight and four, I could tell you exactly where it would end.”

With the same enthusiasm posters from throughout the nation muster when answering questions ranging from how to track a wounded deer to what wood shaft/broadhead combination flies the best when shot from a particular bow, immediately, persons with handles such as “Pondscum” and “Wolf Among Dogs” rallied to offer advice to another longbow and recurve enthusiast whose marriage is on the skids. Dr. Phil could not have done better. Nearly 100 posts and an untold number of viewing before noon, Wilkins post was easily one of the most popular on Monday.

    “Have her hold your targets for you,” offered TaterSalad from Texas.

    “It won’t work,” warned Edward Carneal of Virginia, aka Foxbo.  “May as well settle it one way or the other now and get it over with.  I’ve been there.”

Some on “The Wall” were more hopeful, offering prayers while others urged Wilkins to spice up his unhappy home with a little Old Testament inspired “man law”.

    “Sounds like your wifes [sic] security blaknet [sic] is you,” said Sixby, a self-described “pastoral councelor” from Oregon.

    “Remember, You da man. [sic]  Not she da man, [sic] You da man. [sic] You cannot have authority in the home and over your life until you take possession of your manhood and take that authority and do it with love.” While some believe such message boards hurt hunters by needless exposing the general public to the mindless meanderings and disturbingly pervasive right-wing, Christian zealotry common among the ranks of the American hunter, seemingly off-topic posts on message boards like The Leatherwall remain the most popular.

    “Some sap whining about his horrible marriage is just the tip of the iceberg,” says one industry insider who declined to be named because the subject is sensitive. “Advertising dollars for websites like The Stickbow are based on the number of daily ‘hits’ to a particular website.  So if the owner of that site can regularly drum up website traffic by letting their members debate the words of Jesus, Rush Limbaugh, or bash controversial figures in the industry…all the better for them.”

To the question of relevance this and scores of other off-topic posts have to do with the subject of traditional archery, Pat Effeminate, a Connecticut bank securities and information officer for Lincoln Financial Group and founder of The Stickbow, was reportedly off on his seventh trophy whitetail hunt in Kansas (in as many years) and could not be reached for comment.