Last July I went with my good friend Steven Schwankert to dive the Lion City, a sunken village that lies at the bottom of Qiandaohu lake in Zhejiang. Our guide was Wang Jianguo, a Chunan-based commercial diver and part of the team that discovered the Lion City. Jianguo was good company and a good guide, familiar with the twists and turns of the city and confident in the lake's cold and murky water. In the evenings, after our dives, we enjoyed dinner with Jianguo, his wife and his precocious and adorable daughter.

According to Steve, Jianguo failed to surface after a maintenance dive on the Qiandaohu dam last week. His body was recovered three days later.

Anyone who moves in the world of commercial diving or technical diving, commercial diving's hobbyist cousin, knows how risky either can be. No matter how well we plan and prepare, we assume a measure of risk by putting ourselves into an especially demanding and unforgiving environment. For those of us who do this for fun, that's the deal we make to see the things that fascinate us and that other divers don't get to see. Those who do it for work find their own motivations. But few people end up in that world unless they really want to be there.

Until now, I've never personally known anyone who died doing this. I've heard some sad stories about friends-of-friends, witnessed an emergency or two, and I know people who have survived harrowing, near-death experiences lost inside shipwrecks with their air running out.

We sometimes joke about these experiences in the bull-swapping sessions that thrive on the decks of dive boats, or tell the tall stories to get a rise out of newbie divers. But, bull aside, the most acute fear I have ever felt was on my first shipwreck penetration, in a lightless, confined, silty space under 45 meters of water, with narcosis eroding the edges of my vision and my heartbeat thumping in my ears. And that was a dive when everything went well. Books about commercial and technical diving are often morbid body counts.

Despite all that, it's still a shock when someone you know doesn't come up after a dive.

The lake was Jianguo's back yard. I don't know exactly what happened to him down there. Sometimes you never find out. You're just left with the nagging thought that, while these things happen, this particular thing shouldn't have happened to that particular person in that particular place.

I went through my photographs from that weekend in Qiandaohu. In my few photos of Jianguo his face is obscured. That's a shame. Archived on my hard drive is unedited video of that trip. I'll try to turn that into something I can share.

I was looking forward to diving with Jianguo again this summer.

  Wang Jianguo, obscured.