Toggle Nav
King of the Catch Crowned at Angling Direct HQ
Rick Hurley, our coarse category winner, was first to take his seat in the throne. Rick came first place in the coarse fishing category with a beautiful tench capture and he’ll soon be off enjoying a week of hosted sturgeon fishing in Canada with the Sportquest team.
Jodie Sloane, our junior category winner, will be the first of our angling royalty to head off for their holiday. Jodie and her dad, Wes, will be taking off to Spain for a week of carp and catfishing on the Ebro. The angling trip will mean that Jodie has to take an extra week off school – as you can imagine, she is more than happy to make that sacrifice!
Sea fishing winner Ben Creaser was next on the throne. He brought his angling companion along with him in order to help share the mammoth drive from the Isle of Wight to Angling Direct HQ to join us for our prize giving ceremony. The pair will be travelling even further afield when the time comes to take their holiday and they are headed to Norway for a hosted week of sea fishing!
Our Queen of the Catch was up next! Arezue Omid stormed the field this year and won over 1,000 votes to clinch victory in the predator category – the single most votes of any entrant. She’ll be joined by her husband for a week of angling on John Wilson’s private lake out in Thailand.
Last, but by no means least, carp winner Ray Rutter took his turn on the carbon throne. Ray is a seasoned traveller and he likes to spend as much time angling away from the UK as possible. We’re pleased to help him out with this endeavour and he’s the second of our contestants to be headed to Canada. This time, the Sportquest team will be helping Ray hunt out some giant carp – hopefully he’ll manage to land one that is as beautiful as his winning picture was.
Paul from Sportquest joined us on the day of the ceremony to give his congratulations to all of our winners, as well as to ensure they had all the information they needed ahead of their holidays. The winners were also given a tour of the huge Angling Direct warehouse by our warehouse manager, Lee. Being in our warehouse is very much like being a child in a sweet shop and, more than once, our winners suggested a ‘Supermarket Sweep’ style tour of the premises! They were then treated to lunch from our favourite local café, before being taken to our in-house photography studio. Here’s a little bit of Angling Direct trivia for you: our warehouse manager Lee was a professional photographer in a former life, so all the photos you’ll see over the coming months will have been taken with his expert hands. Once the final handshakes were over and done with, we sent our angling royalty on their way – laden with angling gear from all our sponsors and with the excitement of their holiday at the forefront of their thoughts!
We can’t wait to share all the news from our winners’ holidays this year. Keep an eye out on our social media channels, where we’ll be sharing all our winners’ holiday posts, and we’ll be back with you soon with catch reports from their trips!
It has been another incredible year of King of the Catch. This competition wouldn’t be possible without your entries or the support from our amazing sponsors. All that’s left for us to do is to say a final thank you to everyone involved in the competition and to wish our winners the best of luck on their holidays – we’re sure it will be an experience they’ll remember for the rest of their lives!
