By Todd Ceisner
BassFan Editor

On a scale of 1 to 10, Peter Thliveros said the recently-completed FLW Tour season rated a solid 8 in his book in terms of how much fun he had competing.

Part of his reasoning for such a bullish assessment was simply because of the success he had. He ended the year 12th in the Angler of the Year points race – his best showing on the FLW side since 1999 – and cashed checks in five of six events. Next month, he’ll compete in the Forrest Wood Cup for the first time since 2000.

The other component to his enjoyment was the simpler approach he took on the water. He didn’t go into tournaments with set-in-stone game plans that he forced himself to stick to. Instead, he fished a lot more freely and it allowed him to make sometimes bold adjustments that led to strong finishes.

“It was one of those deals where I had a year where I allowed myself one day to screw up and one day to make up,” he said. “Fortunately, it worked out well in that I was able to do that. There were a lot of fish caught in a lot of tournaments this year and I was able to make up some ground on day 2 in some of them, which is unusual. Typically, if you start out behind, you tend to stay there. I think I made good choices all season and I was way more open-minded. I wasn’t fishing scared. I fished the way I used to fish and took some chances.”

Risk-Reward at Potomac

When asked to cite an example of how his change in strategy benefited him, he pointed to the season finale at the Potomac River, where his day-2 weight was nearly 5 pounds better than his day-1 result and led to a 32nd-place finish.

“On day 1, I fished kind of safe, thinking I’d picked the area that had the most fish and the most area that would support the boats that would be there,” he said. “I tried to pick a crowd-friendly area. I caught a limit in there, but it felt like I was starting at zero because everybody had 9 or 10 pounds that day.

“On day 2, I knew I could do that again and hope to get a better bite or two or I could go to a place where I had better bites in practices and have a chance of catching two or three good fish.”

He opted for the latter and while he found himself around other competitors again, he used their presence to his advantage.

“That fact that other boats were fishing there helped me out,” he said. “I fished around them without interfering with them and that put me in areas where fish weren’t being pressured. It put me around better fish.”

He followed up the 9-13 from day 1 with a 14-11 on day 2 to close the season on a high note.

“Instead of playing it safe, I ended up taking a little risk and it worked out better,” he added.

He started the year with a 62nd-place finish at Lake Toho, then reeled off three straight Top-30s – his first such stretch since 2011, his last year on the Elite Series – to get some momentum going.

“I just fished each day for itself,” he said. “I just went out and said, ‘This is the approach I’m going to take and I fished really loose. I just kept rolling with whatever was in front of me instead of following a premeditated plan and did what I had to do to get bites.

Fishing “loose” was something he said he’d gotten away from in recent seasons.

“I put myself in a pattern of ‘I’m good enough to do it how I’m going to do that and I’m going to catch them this way regardless of what’s going on and not deviate from the plan,’” he said. “That wasn’t successful. You have to be open-minded and follow the progression of each day. It’s not easy to do.”

Opportunity Knocks

As for his return to the Cup, Thliveros is pumped for a chance to return to the big stage. His last Bassmaster Classic was the 2009 event at the Red River. His last Cup was in 2000, also at the Red River (he qualified for the 2001 Cup, which was cancelled due to the 9/11 attacks).

“It’s been a long time coming,” he said. “The first few years, I put a lot of pressure on myself to perform and it didn’t work out. This year, it worked out better with the approach I took. I’m excited to be back there again, but it’s been so long since I’ve been to Ouachita.

“Championships have not been my strong suit. Typically, I’ve been satisfied with being there, but now having not been there in so long, I don’t see it so much as a feather in my cap but as an opportunity. I was taking it for granted making the Classic so frequently and thinking that being there was good enough. Now it’s not because it’s so hard to make it to these events. Now it’s an opportunity at a big payday.”

Order Up!

Thliveros said his new Evinrude motor only has 45 hours of use on it this year, largely because most of his free time between tournaments is taken up by his family’s newest endeavor – owning and operating Charlie’s Diner featuring Peter T’s Red Dog Bar-B-Que, a breakfast, lunch and BBQ joint just outside of Jacksonville, Fla.

“My family’s been in the restaurant business since I was a teenager,” Thliveros said. “I’d always helped my dad with the restaurant, which was nice because he gave me time off to be able to fish and I always had a job to come back to.”

While the previous restaurants had always been Italian – every restaurant his dad owned bore the name Pizza Italiano – Thliveros wanted to branch out and do something different.

“I enjoyed doing that, but I’d got to the point where I’d wanted to do barbeque for a long time,” he said. “I found a place that was a diner, but had done barbeque before.”

The Thliveros family took over Charlie’s Diner last September after the owner of the building, who tried his hand and running the restaurant, decided he wasn’t cut out for the food service industry.

“It was already operational,” Thliveros said, “so we left it under that name.”

It’s been a daily labor of love for himself and his wife ever since. They have a staff of eight employees and Thliveros does “90 percent” of the cooking when he’s there. The recipes are 100 percent his.

“It’s a lot of work and requires a lot of time,” he said. “It’s basically the same hours as fishing. I’m up at 4 and get there at 5 or 5:15. We’re done between 3 and 4 and home by 5 or 6. The hours are the same, but the job description is different.”

Thliveros said business has been on a slow upward swing as he looks to build a loyal customer base through word of mouth.

“We’ve done no advertising and we’re relying strictly on word of mouth,” he said. “We’ve had good and bad weeks, but more good weeks and it’s been increasing since we took it over.”

He prides himself on everything on the menu being homemade – “The veggies are fresh or frozen, nothing canned,” he added. The burgers are hand-shaped, the sauces homemade, the meats smoked on site.

“It’s all stuff I’ve been wanting to do for years,” he said.

As for his dad, who at 87 was effectively out of the restaurant business, he didn’t stay on the sidelines long after seeing his son’s latest endeavor.

“He was so impressed with it,” Thliveros said, “he went and got another Italian joint.”

Notable

> To learn more about Charlie's Diner, click here.