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Now Hazelwood may never command anything bigger than the 16-ft. catamaran sitting in his backyard. His future hinges entirely on what an Alaskan jury decides took place on the night of March 23. Was Hazelwood drunk? He has admitted drinking just two beers over a five-hour period in the town of Valdez before boarding the ship. At least one barmate, Radio Electronics Officer Joel Roberson, contends that Hazelwood was drinking a "clear" beverage that was probably vodka. Still, his companions agree that Hazelwood did not consume an excessive amount of alcohol while ashore.
Before boarding, Hazelwood wired Easter flowers to his wife and their 13- year-old daughter Alison, a junior high school honor student. Once aboard, he went to his quarters, where he says he drank two bottles of Moussy, a & beerlike beverage containing about 0.5% alcohol that had been stocked aboard the Valdez. After the spill, two empty bottles were found in his room.
The ship was ordered to set sail for California at 9 p.m., an hour before schedule. Squeezed for time, Hazelwood made several trips from the bridge to his cabin, say his attorneys, to labor over the cumbersome paperwork that had increasingly become his duty because of crew cutbacks. He returned to the bridge at roughly 11:15 p.m., shortly before the state's harbor pilot, following routine, departed from the ship at Rocky Point. Soon thereafter Hazelwood radioed the Coast Guard to say he would move the vessel from the outbound shipping lane to the inbound shipping lane to avoid ice. It was the last maneuver of Hazelwood's Exxon career.
At approximately 11:50 Hazelwood turned over control of the vessel to Third Mate Cousins. Second Mate Lloyd LeCain, who was exhausted and asleep, was supposed to relieve Cousins, but the third mate had told him to take his time. In any case, Hazelwood ordered Cousins to make a right turn back into the outbound lanes when the vessel reached a navigational point near Busby Island, three miles north of Bligh Reef. The captain then returned to his cabin, just 15 ft. and one stairway from the bridge, reportedly to complete his paperwork.
What happened after that remains fuzzy. The ship's log shows the vessel passing Busby Island at 11:55 p.m., when Cousins told Hazelwood by phone that he was starting to turn. But the ship's course recorder shows that the Valdez did not start to change direction until seven minutes later. Next, the lookout on duty ran into the ship's pilothouse to report that a flashing red buoy near Bligh Reef, which should have been visible on the port (left) side, had been spotted on the starboard (right) side.
The Valdez was not responding well to Cousins' order to turn. One reason may be that the helmsman, Robert Kagan, feeling that the Valdez was turning too sharply back toward the outbound lanes, used a counter-rudder maneuver to slow the swing. Initially, Kagan acknowledged making such a maneuver, but he has since retracted the statement in Government hearings. A counter-rudder maneuver, however, is registered in the ship's course recorder. Whatever the reason for the ship's unresponsiveness, Cousins repeated the order and then followed it with another command for a hard-right rudder.