Miami Tall Ship Heads South to Bring Aid to Haiti

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While most young professionals spend their days holed up in cubicles, Jared Talarski, 29, has made a career captaining a schooner and lending a hand to those in need.
 
He spoke with YPNation about his sailing career and recent relief voyage to Haiti on the Liberty Schooner.
 
You're a captain on a ship. What's that job like?
It's a great job. The nice part of working on a schooner is you do a little bit of everything just to pay bills, from education work with inner city kids to corporate fundraising. Since this is a season-to-season boat, I also get to go between New York City and Miami, offshore for sometimes two weeks at a time. It's very diverse, very exciting. Every day is different.
 
And you do it full-time?
Yes.
 
How did you get involved with sailing?
I used to be chef, and about 10 years ago I started cooking on boats. There was one point where they needed me on deck, and I steered the boat through a storm. After that, I never wanted to go back into the galley. I worked my way up through the ranks, from steward to deck hand to engineer to mate. I've now had my captain's license for seven years.
 
You get to do something much different than most. Do you feel lucky to do what you do?
Absolutely, but it's not for everyone. Some people on board really can't wait to get off the boat, and back into their comfortable offices. You really need to love this work—there's no in the middle. People get seasick, and you're wet all the time, dealing with weather, dealing with all the elements and unpredictable situations. For me that’s the draw, but for other people that’s why they don’t like it.
 
You recently went to Haiti. What inspired you to go there?
It was interesting. We were having a pretty slow season in Miami, making just enough to pay the bills, and really didn’t have much scheduled that we were obligated to do. When the earthquake happened, the morning of, our owner on the boat and I sat down. Within five minutes we decided to fill the boat with whatever we could and get it to Haiti. We worked 24 hours a day for nine days, with a crew of 10.
 
All the materials were donated—more than five tons of medical and food supplies. We went to the city of Jacmel, and from what I could see and from the reports I read, 80-90 percent of it was leveled. It looked like a scene from a World War II movie.
 
Were there other ships there doing the same thing?
We were one of the first ones. There was a vessel from the Dominican Republic, offloading thousands of small bottles of water. This is how chaotic things get: They lifted water up with the cargo net and dumped it on the dock—with no soldiers or workers monitoring—and within 15 minutes the crowd came down and took all of it. It was pretty intense.
 
Had you done something like this before?
We had not done disaster relief before, but we'd done medical care with Project MARC. They just dispatched people into Haiti as well, but primarily run programs in Vanuatu [an island nation located in the South Pacific]. They're a wonderful group that does things like dental work and vaccinations.
 
So no disaster relief before?
I'd never been close enough to make a difference, but Miami is a direct hub for what's going out to Haiti. A lot of it is ending up here, in bunkers at airports. Stuff is just sitting there waiting for planes to pick it up and send it over. Almost any other boat that did a matching mission got their stuff from the Florida Keys, Jamaica, or Miami.
 
What was the process for donated goods?
Donations were organized by the group First and Alton, which formed the morning of the earthquake. It was a couple of guys having coffee saying "What can we do?" At a major intersection in Miami, they got trucks and started collecting materials.
 
Some of the other stuff came from local pastors whose church members gave boxes of shoes—there was an outpouring from the poor giving what they didn’t have. Somebody brought two tons of clothing in compressed cubes. Within 10 minutes, people walking by started separating the clothing. I made the decision it wasn’t a viable thing to send to Haiti, and I donated it back into Miami, into a local women's shelter.
 
That’s been one of the big problems with Haiti relief happening the way it did. Lots of local organizations have lost any kind of funding, because people gave everything to Haiti.
 
Are you returning?
We're trying to go back in two weeks, but it's been very hard to get money. They call it donor fatigue. People have already given.
 
And you can't return unless you get the money?
Absolutely. We haven’t been able to raise a dime for our next trip. We have the materials, great groups we're working with, even better than the first time, and the best boat crew I could ask for. But nobody wants to donate money.
 
We need people to donate in order to leave. There's a group in Colorado and we just found out this morning they run a village in Haiti that hasn’t received food. The village hasn't been destroyed, but there was a population increase of 10 percent. No food has been sent. People are being sent into rural countrysides because cities are so horrible. Now these rural communities aren’t getting anything.
 
This is where we come in. Our mission statement since the beginning has been that we're able to anchor off the coast and bring stuff to the beach where no one else has gotten to yet. We did that a little bit the first trip. This trip will strictly be about doing this.
 
(Photo credit: Schooner Liberty/Offloading supplies at the dock in Jacmel, Haiti)
 
Read more on bringing aid to Haiti--beyond the immediate aftermath.