Archery Equipment: HHA Optimizer Lite Cadet

I’m a fixed pin kinda guy. I’ve been shooting a 5 Pin Bowhunting sight for a long enough period that holding high or low, for odd yardages, comes natural to me. I sometimes forget that new archers may have difficulty with this process.

Several weeks ago I was on the Field Course at Stowe Archers with my daughter. We would walk up to a spot that seemed close enough for her to shoot, then she would begin flinging arrows with her Bear Cruzer Lite. If we weren’t standing exactly 5 yards from the target, she struggled.

To try and resolve this problem, I tried to set her 4 Pin sight up for multiple yardages. The pin gap was so large, due to slow arrow speed, that it wasn’t a big enough help and it only confused her.

I realized that maybe a single pin slider would make things a lot less complicated for my little archer. Up until this point, my only experience with movable sights was a brief period with a magnified target sight. Spending several hundred dollars for a six year old was out of the question and I had reservations about spending $100+ on an HHA Optimizer Lite.

One day, completely out of the blue, I came across an HHA Optimizer Lite Cadet on Archery Talk. The seller had two sights that were used by kids and he was selling them for $35 each. In the time it took me to do a little research, one of the sights sold. I jumped on the second sight and a few days later it arrived on my doorstep.

The holidays have been very busy for our family and we haven’t been able to get over to the club to test it out. However, I’m impressed with the build quality. It has tool-less windage adjustment (with hash marks) and the vertical adjustment is smooth for an inexpensive sight.

This particular sight doesn’t use the typical HHA Tapes but I actually prefer it this way. With my daughter still growing, I like the idea of scribbling my own markings on a tape and not having to worry about buying or calculating for new tapes.

The HHA Optimizer Lite Cadet should serve my daughter very well and I wish I would have bought both of the seller’s sights. My wife seemed impressed with it as well – she is also having some trouble with her 3 Pin Sight on odd yardages.