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Hazelwood's special joy -- and gift -- was sailing. Fellow members of the Sea Scouts, an advanced Boy Scout group for teenagers, remember with awe the time they were sailing a 65-ft. schooner across Long Island Sound, and a violent storm blew out the mainsail. "Some of the boys were crying or vomiting," recalls one sailor, but Hazelwood volunteered to climb the 50-ft. mast to haul in the sail and its hardware. "Jeff related to sailing like a pro golfer who swings a club for the first time," recalls Sea Scout Ralph Naranjo, who today runs a local yacht club. "He had a real feeling for the vessel."
In 1964 Hazelwood entered the New York Maritime College at Fort Schuyler, a state-run school in the Bronx whose academic program and military protocol were so demanding that 60% of its students dropped out before graduating. It was at "the Fort" that he began to drink, on weekend revels with cadets escaping the rigors of noon military drills, the hazing of freshmen, and outright bans on civilian clothes, on-campus drinking, even marriage. No one partied with more fervor than Hazelwood and his buddies on the Trolls, the school's lacrosse team. Says W. Bryce Laraway, a fellow Troll and former roommate of Hazelwood's: "On a scale of 1 to 10, we were probably a 14 in terms of drinking. We made the movie Animal House look like amateur work."
Laraway recalls that he, Hazelwood and several other cadets would each routinely down a case of beer on Saturdays at the Long Island home of cadet Saunders Jones, today a sea captain who remains Hazelwood's closest friend. By early evening the boys would turn up at local Huntington bars. By midnight, having rounded up as many as 50 other merrymakers, they would shift the party back to Jones' house, where the drinking would resume on Sundays.
On one occasion, Hazelwood and Laraway got so drunk that they made believe Laraway's convertible Volkswagen was a skateboard. Driving down a steep road, they switched off the engine, leaped into the back and shifted their weight to try to steer the vehicle. During yet another inebriated escapade, Laraway's speeding car flipped over completely on a Long Island highway but landed on ! its wheels. Only later did they notice that the car's backseat was missing.
Despite such moments of boozy abandon, Hazelwood had a reputation, at least among the Trolls, for knowing when to stop. "Jeff seemed to have more common sense than the rest of us, and he could control his drinking," Laraway recalls. "He was the quiet one who didn't go far enough to get into trouble."