Ian and Rawle Jefferds have given much to our community. Now we need to reach out and help their family.
I hate mussels, but I have a great respect for Ian and Rawle Jefferds.
The brothers and co-owners of Penn Cove Shellfish loom large over our town, good men who have done much to make Coupeville a better place.
Every day, when I go down the Hill O’ Death in front of my house and plunge into Penn Cove, I am face-to-face with the mussel rafts they own and operate.
Their processing buildings sit up the hill from my house, and they could hit me with a well-thrown mussel, if they so chose.
Over the years, I have known both men and their families through my jobs — mainly from the many years at Videoville and Miriam’s Espresso — and I have stood next to Ian as he watched a derelict boat burn and threaten the very future of all that he and his family built.
While I will always bitch and moan about mussels and believe them to be the slugs of the sea, forever scarred by my time on the water working for a different, far less competent mussel harvesting company in my younger days, I embrace the Jefferds.
They are good people, they are our people.
And now they need our help.
Seth Jefferds, the middle brother in the family, is a volunteer firefighter in Oso, Washington. His life, like many others, has been devastated in the recent mudslide that decimated the area.
He has lost his wife and his home. His four-month-old granddaughter is among the missing.
Our help will not give him back his family, but it will give a good man hope.
It will show him we do not walk away and leave others to their pain. We help them, in any way we can, at any time we can, because we can. Because we should. Because there is no other way to live our lives.
We are Coupeville. If you are connected to one of us, you are connected to all of us.
Please visit:
Coupeville Sports 