Father and daughter who bonded over diving trips among the 34 killed in boat fire

Scott Chan was an accomplished electrical engineer who worked for legacy Silicon Valley company Juniper Networks but retired early to pursue other passions such as teaching physics and volunteering.

His 26-year-old daughter, Kendra Chan, a biologist for U.S. Fish and Wildlife, loved to explore the natural world by hiking, backpacking and diving.

Father and daughter connected over their shared love of scuba diving.

They would go to the Channel Islands two to three times a year for weekend diving excursions such as the one they were on when the 75-foot commercial diving vessel Conception caught fire early Monday morning and sank in the waters off Southern California, killing them and 32 others.

“They would get custom-fitted wetsuits, and they would talk about all the new equipment they needed,” Vicki Moore, Scott’s wife and Kendra’s mother, told this news organization Wednesday.  “It was just a wonderful thing they did together to bond.”

For Moore and her 22-year-old son Kevin, the loss of their two loved ones is a shock. “It’s very different when your life partner of 35 years is just gone in a flash, and your first-born child is gone. The person you spent all these years nurturing,” Moore said.

“It’s still just this bolt from the blue that I guess all the other friends and family of people on that trip too are experiencing,” Dan Burns, a longtime friend of the Chan family, said Wednesday.

He and Moore said Scott Chan made enough money by cashing in stock before the dot-com bust to retire early, then spent several years volunteering for Los Altos’ bike safety committee and helping out on PTAs before going back to school to brush up on physics.

The Los Altos resident ended up getting a teaching credential from Santa Clara University, then went on to teach at Serra High in San Mateo, Cupertino High and Carlmont High in Belmont before spending the last three years at American High in Fremont.

David Marasco, Chan’s professor at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills where Chan took a refresher course on physics, said Chan was always willing to share his knowledge with others, especially students struggling in the class.

“Some people are very arrogant and boastful, and that’s not the way that he came across,” Marasco said. “He was a very humble guy who was always willing to help.”

Burns, a longtime physics teacher, said he helped Chan set up lesson plans and marveled at how much Chan would work to make things relevant for students, even strapping a GoPro camera to a mini roller coaster model to show the coaster’s perspective of the world.

“He was doing really great at American High School, and I just can’t imagine what they are going through,” Burns said.

Earlier this summer, Chan went diving for roughly a month near East Timor, volunteering to help document coral reefs for research organizations, Moore said.

Moore, a member of the Santa Clara County Planning Commission, said her husband, who worked for many companies as an electrical engineer and hardware designer, had many passions outside of work, including cycling, amateur auto racing and skiing. But he especially loved teaching and interacting with students.

“I think what really drove him to that is not only did he love the subject of physics, but he loved explaining difficult things to people in a way they could understand,” she said. “And the thing that was the main reward for him was to see the difference that he made in his students.”

Moore said their whole family enjoyed exploring, hiking and connecting with the world, and Kendra Chan took that to heart, working as a biologist both in the Pacific Northwest and in Southern California. She also had done volunteer diving for scientific surveys.

“Kendra was just the most amazing young woman. We were both so proud of her, so proud of how she developed over the years, and all of the things that she not only accomplished, but just the passion and curiosity that she had,” Moore said.

Kendra graduated from Mountain View High School in 2011 and the University of California, Davis, in 2015, her mother said.

She said Kendra was “someone who was just living life to the fullest,” making time for hiking and backpacking with friends around the world. She planned to apply to graduate school and continue her work on coastal ecology and marine conservation.

“She wanted to see things, do things, and live a full life,” Moore said.

“It’s just going to take a very long time for everything to sink in, and it’s going to be a different life going forward,” Moore said.

More than two days after the fire, authorities have not officially confirmed any of the 34 people killed, but the identities of about half the victims have emerged in social media posts and online tributes.

In addition to the names that emerged earlier this week of a family of five from Stockton, two high school students and the owner of a Santa Cruz diving company, those of several more victims were confirmed Wednesday.

Deirdre O’Brien, a senior vice president at Apple, confirmed that an employee, Dan Garcia, was among those killed. Yulia Krashennaya, Garcia’s partner, also was aboard the Conception, according to Richard Stehn, a Spiralinks spokesperson.

Krashennaya was a product manager at Spiralinks, where she did contracting work for Cisco Global Event Marketing. Garcia and Krashennaya were avid divers and underwater photographers who participated in dives around the world.

Lisa Fiedler, 52, a Mill Valley hairstylist and a photography enthusiast, was among those believed to be dead, her mother Nancy Fiedler told ABC7 News, although she is awaiting a DNA test confirmation. Friends and former clients in North Carolina, where Fiedler once co-owned a salon, were shocked when they heard about her death Tuesday through a former salon client, who saw that Fiedler had posted on Facebook about going diving aboard the Conception.

“She was an extremely talented hairstylist and one of the most adventurous girls I had ever met. She tried all different kinds of things,” said Laura Frederiksen, co-owner of Salon Botanical, the salon Fiedler helped found.

Neal Baltz and his partner, Patricia Beitzinger, both were aboard the Conception when it caught fire, according to Michael Pierce, viticulture and enology director at Yavapai College in Prescott, Arizona, where Baltz was taking winemaking classes. Pierce described the couple as “avid outdoors folks” and “adventurers.”

“Neal was friends with everybody. He had time for everybody and was a positive influence on all of us,” Pierce added.

Two Santa Monica residents and friends, Marybeth Guiney and Charles “Chuck” McIlvain, were also among the passengers, according to friends.

The Santa Monica Pier Aquarium is hosting a vigil at 6 p.m. Thursday for Guiney and McIlvain as well as other victims.

Guiney, a sales director from Santa Monica, was a longtime diver and “fierce protector” of the oceans and sea creatures, according to her friend of 10 years, Newsha Tarifard. McIlvain worked at Sony Picture Imageworks in Culver City for 15 years, Culver City Councilman Alex Fisch told the Los Angeles Times. Fisch texted McIlvain’s wife, Jasmine, who said her husband had been on the boat. “It was a total gut punch,” Fisch told the Times, adding that McIlvain recently celebrated his 44th birthday.