After being ousted from Subhas Sarobar which was turned into a parking lot for the Fifa Under-17 World Cup at the Salt Lake stadium, anglers are back, hook, line and sinker. While angling resumed at the waterbody opposite Swabhumi the very next day after the England-Spain final on October 28, Central Park too has opened to anglers.

Annual Angling Programme 2017, organised by the urban recreation forestry division, was inaugurated on November 6 by forest minister Binoy Krishna Burman.

A gate put up at the Banabitan entrance announces the season to continue till November 30. But Anjan Guha, the deputy conservator of forests, says the last date might change. “We decide the duration of the angling season based on two factors — the arrival of the migratory birds and the onset of winter when the fish are reluctant to come up from the waterbed and take the bait. So we might reduce or extend the closing date based on that.”

Currently there are 100 seats on offer with five more VIP seats and 15 reserved seats.

“All seats are going full. We have already crossed Rs 3.5 lakh in collection,” said Ashoke Mukherjee, the range officer at Banabitan.

Tickets cost Rs 600 for a day but there is a caveat. “If a person catches a fish weighing 10kg or more he has to either cough up the price of another ticket or leave,” says Guha. Such a case has already occurred this season when a Rajarhat resident was asked to leave with his 10kg catch when he refused to pay for another ticket. But there is no bar on the total weight of fish caught. “Three days back someone caught 24kg of fish,” said Mukherjee.

Officials are also making anglers release juvenile fish weighing less than 500g.

Of the 100 tickets on offer for general people, 40 are being sold through lottery and 60 on a first-come-first-served basis. On any given day, tickets for the next five days are being sold.

“We started selling tickets from November 4. The guards told me that people had started queuing up from 2am. Last time it was 4am for the first few days,” smiles Mukherjee.

The biggest haul of the first day was an 8.5kg rohu with which the minister posed for pictures. Both he and the principal secretary Chandan Sinha sat for a while with a fishing rod.

Tickets are being sold from 11am to 4pm, at gate no. 1 of Banabitan, opposite Bikas Bhavan. But the reserved seats are likely to get withdrawn in a week once the migratory birds start flocking to Central Park, Mukherjee said.