Thieves Tunnel Through Wall, Steal Diamonds Fly Rods

It’s the classic movie heist. A handful of bandits, undoubtedly led by some guy named Moe or Chuckles, case the target joint, then devise a crazy scheme to tunnel through a wall and steal all the loot. In the movies, the joint is usually a bank or some fancy museum, and the loot is always something like diamonds, rubies or King Tut’s long lost golden toilet seat.

But this is real life. And, apparently, in real life the bandits aren’t after diamonds, rare artifacts or even cash. Instead, they want fly rods.

You can’t make this stuff up. A group of thieves in the UK actually tunneled through the wall of a tackle shop, Shawshank Redemption-style. They snagged all the shops’ fly rods, some “specialist fishermen’s clothing” (sounds like fancy fly threads to me), a handful of reels and a bunch of air rifles.

I’ve got no love for thieves, buy you’ve got to give these guys a little credit for their creativity. I’m wondering why the heck these obviously sophisticated criminals are spending their time lifting fly rods out of some poor bloke’s tackle shop when they could be tunneling under the Louvre (yes, geography nerds, I know the Louvre is in Paris, it’s not that far away).

Here’s a conspiracy theory for you: Maybe the green nuts have decided to stop fighting at the policy level and are taking it to the streets. Perhaps the PETA crazies figure if they can’t get anglers legislated off the planet, they’ll just steal all the gear before we can get our hands on it.

Okay, that may be a little far-fetched, but if the greenies can get away with making broad, uncouth and wildly unscientific observations about entire groups of people, why can’t I?