The 2010 FLW Tour season will be decidedly different for Jacob Powroznik than the last several have been. In addition to the widely reported changes to the Tour itself, he and fellow Virginia resident David Dudley will be without their favorite running buddies, Koby Kreiger and Craig Powers, who announced last month that they were leaving in the wake of the sponsorship situation.



It's not that those two duos exchanged a lot of fishing information, but they frequently got together for games of basketball or tennis, and they could release the stress of a tough day on the water by ragging each other on the court.

Powroznik said he'll do his best to take all of the new conditions in stride. Over the past 3 years he's established himself as one of the circuit's most consistent performers and he wants to continue his progression.

"It's going to be an unusual year in some ways and I hope someday it can get back to the way it used to be," he said. "I'm going to stick with FLW for as long as I can because this is where I started and I can't see myself going anywhere else.

"When everybody gets through this tough time and they get the sponsors back, FLW should jump right back up to where it was and be at the top of the game."

Solid Again

Powroznik finished 9th in the 2009 Angler of the Year (AOY) race, his third straight showing of 11th or better on that list. He started the campaign with a 109th-place finish at Guntersville, his worst on the Tour since 2006, but recovered nicely with a 7th and a 14th in the next two events and nothing worse than a 52nd the rest of the way.

"Out of all my years of fishing, that (Guntersville) tournament was the one that probably hurt me the most," the 31-year-old said. "Every day in practice I was finding four or five areas where I could catch 20- to 25-pound bags on consecutive casts, so I was on big wads of them.

"I was catching them on Rat-L-Traps and stuff like that, and then I'd throw a big jig in the same spot and one would get it and I'd shake him off. Then another one would pick it up right away and I'd shake him off too."

His stuff held up for day 1, but day 2 was another matter entirely.

"The first day I caught 20 pounds in 10 minutes and I was like, 'Great, they're still here.' Then the next day I never got a bite – not a bite! I probably stayed with it too long because there's so many fish in that place that I probably could've just gone fishing and picked up a few here and there. But I'm learning more about that stuff every year."

He tabbed the 7th at Norman as the highlight of his year, but there was a bittersweet tinge to that one because it could've been better. On day 3 he pulled a 6-pounder off a bed, but had to release her because she was hooked through the top of the nose (outside the mouth). The following day he lost the same 5 1/2-pounder three times, and each instance was caught by the TV camera.

"If it was meant to be, that bed-fish would've been hooked in the mouth and that other one would've come right to the boat. But being in that Top 10 with Koby and Andy Morgan was still a lot of fun.

"To win a tournament these days, you look back on a lot of them and you'll see that the guy caught a 5-pounder with 5 minutes left or something like that. You've got to have some luck – everything has to fall into place and the stars have to line up right."

No Cause for Concern

Powroznik knows that to win an AOY, he can't afford even one stumble of the type that befell him last year at Guntersville. With that in mind, he looks favorably upon the 2010 Tour schedule.

"I like it a lot," he said. "These kind of lakes we're going to now suit my style. I always did pretty well in the shakey-head tournaments, but what I've tried the last couple of years was to learn more about fishing deep."

He's always been most comfortable in the shallows, but he's greatly enhanced his offshore repertoire over the past couple of seasons.

"If you can find one or two places out there that have them wadded up, you can catch five right off the bat and then go try to get a big one shallow by flipping mats or whatever. The way things have gotten, unless it's a full-blown spawn event, the majority of the tournaments are won by somebody who found some piece of offshore structure that nobody else did.

"You're not going to do that at a place like the Red River (where the Tour opens in 2 weeks), but you might find a shallow ditch out in the middle that nobody's keying on."

He's limiting his own schedule to the six Tour events – he won't fish the restructured Eastern FLW Series or the Northern American Fishing Series (formerly Strens) this year.

" I'll just concentrate on (the Tour) and try to stay up there in points and make another (Forrest Wood Cup). I'm going to fish to win every tournament, but my realistic goal is just to do the best I can in each one of them."

Notable

> Powroznik doesn't take issue with the Tour's switch this year to the full field fishing the first 3 days and only the Top 5 advancing to the final day (previously, the field was cut to the Top 10 for the final 2 days). "If you finish 9th or 10th, you're still going to make a good check. And if you do get into the Top 5, that'll be more TV time and more of a chance to plug your sponsors."

>He'll start the new season at No. 12 in the BassFan World Rankings.