My excitement ebbed when a body recovery dive team crashed the Division of Wildlife Resources' bunkhouse at Wahweap for a quick night's sleep before searching for a drowning victim.

The real bummer was the next morning when we came to Gregory Butte, the site where the incident happened. I had heard by that time that the victim was a 19-year-old from Seattle.

I kept playing scenarios through my head on what could have happened as we rode in the boat past buoys set up in a grid to aid in the search for the body.

I tried to get the image of the teenage boy's fate out of my mind, but I didn't do a very good job of it. I kept thinking what his family must have been going through and how so many lives were surely impacted by the loss.

The image dulled as a day of good fishing, good company and incredible scenery progressed. The stripers weren't boiling and the crappie were tucked tight in the brush, but the smallmouth fishing was on fire. Memories were being made by the second.

The doom of the drowning was rekindled and magnified when Lake Powell biologist Wayne Gustaveson allowed me to check my e-mail that night on his office computer. I opened the e-mail press release from Glen Canyon National Recreation Area and was disappointed to learn the details of the incident.

The teen was standing on the bow seat of a powerboat holding a bow line with the boat on plane. The person running the boat slowed down and the 19-year-old went off the front. The operator of the boat and a passenger heard a thud when the teen hit the bottom of the vessel. The search began immediately, but he never resurfaced - wasn't wearing a life jacket - and remains lost to the depths as I write this.

At a place like Powell, it's easy to forget how dangerous boating can be. The relaxing nature of the environment tends to put you at ease, which is the reason so many people want to go in the first place.

But there is a difference between relaxing and being silly. Trying to dump someone in the water from a boat moving at high speed is dangerous. The young man's poor family and friends - some of whom may have contributed to his death - learned the hard way just how horribly horseplay can go wrong. While the release from the park service said nothing about horseplay, it's pretty easy to imagine what was going on from the description.

I never met the missing young man, but I feel sorry for his loss. Witnessing the effort to recover his body helped provide a lesson I'll not soon forget.

Brett Prettyman can be reached at brettp@sltrib.com.