Thieves steal Sea Scouts sailboat, leave worse one behind
Worse things happen at sea
Someone in Marina del Rey pulled off a low-effort act of piracy: stealing a Sea Scouts sailboat and leaving behind a beat-up replacement, complete with swapped registration numbers to delay anyone from noticing.
A leader of the troop (Sea Scout Ship 16) first noticed that the 1979 Islander sailboat named “Island Hopper” was missing from its slip on Saturday. To make things stranger, the troop leader noticed a similar-looking sailboat “in pretty rough shape” tied up at the far end of the dock, Sea Scout Ship 16 Skipper Paul Renner told KTLA.
After examining the boat, the troop leader discovered that someone had removed Island Hopper’s DMV-assigned vessel number and attached it to the run-down ship at the end of the dock.
“When the sheriff arrived, he postulated that the perpetrator had seen our boat days or weeks before, and decided to ‘trade up,’ swap CF numbers and hope we didn’t notice,” Renner said.
This is what piracy looks like when nobody’s trying.