What's the secret to shooting off the shely witout fishtailing, or damaging your fletches?

You must shoot feathers. There will always be some fishtailing. However, you can minimize it by finding the perfect spined arrow. It takes a ton of experimentation with tip weights and cutting of shafts.

shooting off the shelf requires that you setup the bow for the nock point with a unfletched arrow shaft. The length of the feathers is also critical as how soon the arrow recovers. It also will depend on using the bow for field or hunting on the length of feathers 5.5 or 5.0 mag feathers for hunting and 3.0 or 4.0 for field or target hunting. I start at a nock point of 1/8 high and a brass nock point, and I go from there. go to stickbow.com or tradgang.com and lots of traditional help for setup etc.