The Caribbean Desperately Needs Your Help

*Please Donate to Waves For Water’s Hurricane Relief Effort, Here*

“I think we will live,” I thought I heard Jimmy say. The FaceTime connection was spotty at best, nonexistent at worst. In moments of pixelated revelation, I saw a stack of survival supplies, a sullen grilled cheese cooking on the top of a toaster, wind whipping trees, the forewarning grey of a sideways rain stealing the life and colour out of a typically paradisiacal island.

And I saw fear in my friend’s blurry eyes as he broke down the situation.
My Jimmy, by the way, is Jimmicane Wilson. Jimmy’s one of the world’s best surf photographers and, today, he is one of the world’s best people. Along with Ben Bourgeois, Dylan Graves and Otto Flores, Jimmy went to the Caribbean to help with the Hurricane Irma recovery efforts with Waves For Water frontman Jon Rose. The crew based themselves out of the US Virgin Isle Saint Croix, due to it being relatively unaffected from Irma.

The beautiful island of St. Croix, pictured here, was spared the brunt of Irma’s beating. You can imagine what the other islands look like.

Everything was going according to plan. Then came Hurricane Maria.

She clawed her way into becoming a Category 5 storm and squared up with the Caribbean. And this time, it doesn’t appear as though Saint Croix will be so lucky. The small island is currently bracing for a big hit.

I spoke to Jimmy just after 3 PM local time. He told me that Maria is expected to do her worst from Midnight to 1 PM. They are staying in a hotel right on the beach and are expecting 100 MPH winds. They weren’t able to board the windows. They are anticipating the roof to tear off and the lower floors to flood. They are going to have a hard time staying safe.

We can’t prevent, but we can support.

Reality tends to grasp your consciousness when you have a friend in a situation like this. But it does so on a whole new level when that friend says something profound. Towards the end of the conversation, when I told Jimmy I was proud of what he was doing, he replied “I had to. I’ve had so much fun around here over the years.”

I owe this to them. I’ve had fun there over the years. Do I owe something to them, too? The answer is absolutely yes.

And if you’ve surfed in the Caribbean, so do you. Even if you haven’t been there — even if you haven’t been on a surf trip — the reality, which I hope will grasp, is that a wave-rich and amazing region of our planet is enduring something catastrophic. If you are in a position to give, give.

Let’s try something here. If you’re a regular, you already know that Stab is once again independently owned and that a new Editor was hired, that a conscious effort is being made to turn not just our anarchist comment section, but our entire site, into a radical community.

So now, I’m going to ask something from that newly minted Stab community. From the staff to commenters to companies that advertise here: let’s give.

The Caribbean community has provided us with waves to surf, clips to watch and some of the most gorgeous boardshort shoots to date. Now is the time to pay that back.

The Stab crew have started the evening fundraiser off with a $200 donation. Donate now, here. Post a receipt of your donation to Instagram or Facebook or Disqus, and we’ll post it below (complete with a love note, if you’d like! Be sweet, assholes!)