ResortHatch

Adrian did it. He can say for the rest of his life that his proposal to Abonée at Sandals Grande St. Lucian can never be topped. Their engagement story will always include the components of “unreal:” The depths of the Caribbean Sea. A vibrant coral reef. A curious stingray. And an engagement ring sparkling like a single star in the vast turquoise ocean.

A Big Surprise for Abonée

A little fear for Adrian, which traces to perhaps the most unreal component of all. “You need to know what he went through to get to that point,” Abonée says of Adrian’s underwater proposal. A few months earlier, Adrian didn’t even know how to swim. He did know he wanted to marry Abonée, and he did know he wanted to “wow” her. He was even willing to jump into an ocean for her hand.“Love makes you do crazy things,” Abonée says.

She knows now that her soft-spoken fiancé, in addition to being driven, is a careful listener. This whole idea about proposing in the Caribbean Sea started when he heard Abonée casually mention St. Lucia as a dream destination. The daughter of a father in the Air Force, she’d seen the world: England, Hawaii, Japan. But the words “St. Lucia” sounded special when she said them.

Adrian privately tucked those words into his conscious and began to plot a strategy.
“She’s very smart,” he says, “and I knew it would be hard to keep a secret from her.”
He used a different Wifi network to look up Sandals Grande St. Lucian. There, he discovered a menu of unique proposal packages. On the beach. On a catamaran. Over a candlelight dinner next to the ocean. The one that grabbed his attention, however, also shook his nerves: The Treasure Under the Sea package.

“I looked at other options because of the swimming part,” Adrian says, “but I kept coming back to the underwater proposal because I’d never heard of anything like it. She definitely wouldn’t expect it. I also wouldn’t have to make a speech underwater, so that became my goal.” What he did next epitomizes a man in love.

Every Tuesday night for the next three months, Adrian quietly went to a swimming class. When Abonée’s family decided to take a trip to Cancun, Adrian went with them so he could learn to snorkel in the ocean without giving away his Sandals Grande St. Lucian plan. He even learned sign language, so when the big day came he could communicate underwater. “I had no clue what was about to happen when we got to Sandals,” Abonée says.

She thought she had the St. Lucia vacation all figured out. An unforgettable underwater proposal at Sandals Grande St. Lucian transformed a dream vacation into a magical fairy tale engagement story.

She and Adrian looked at all 27 available restaurants beforehand and picked where they’d eat on each day. There would be a beach day, for sure. A pool day, definitely. And one excursion. “Adrian said he wanted to do SNUBA,” Abonée says, laughing now at the puzzle piece she missed. “I thought, ‘Oh, that’s impressive. He went through all the trouble to learn how to swim and to snorkel in Mexico, all so we could SNUBA® together in St. Lucia.’”

The morning of the proposal, Adrian slipped away from breakfast to finalize the plan with the aquatics staff. “They already had it figured out,” Adrian says. “The ring would go into a weighted cup to keep it from floating. They’d have a crew there to make sure everything went smoothly. The whole Sandals staff was so calm and reassuring — and I needed that. All I had to do was meet them on the beach with Abonée.”

When the two of them showed up at the dive boat, Adrian shook the hand of the divemaster as if they hadn’t met an hour earlier. At first, Abonée wondered why so many Sandals team members were on the boat. “They were all excited to be going onto the water,” she says, “so I just got caught up in their enthusiasm.” After the captain took them on a scenic cruise along the northern tip of St. Lucia, he pulled over the SNUBA spot. Adrian didn’t hesitate. Abonée was surprised to see him jump into the Caribbean Sea.

“The ring was there, the ocean was there, we were there,” he says. “I couldn’t not do it.” Seeing him splash and knowing how hard he must have worked to swim in the ocean with her, Abonée joined him. After descending toward the ocean floor, the Sandals dive team pointed out colorful fish, coral … and a cup.

“It’s a good thing I couldn’t say anything underwater,” she says, “because I would have said, ‘Wait, we can’t eat or drink down here.’ But then he handed the cup to me and I took the lid off.” For a micro-second the ring floated just high enough so it seemed every living creature in the ocean could marvel at it. Abonée stopped focusing on her breathing technique and instead stared at the ring and at the sign Adrian held in front of her: “Will You Marry Me?”

She saw a man who had defeated his own fear for her, who went a thousand extra miles for her, all the way to the bottom of the ocean. And so, Abonée bent her wrist repeatedly, the universal sign language for, “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

Up on the boat, a bottle of champagne appeared. Back at the dock, the Sandals culinary team had a cake ready for the newly engaged couple. In their room, flower petals and a fruit platter heightened the joy. Everywhere, pictures would capture one incomparable moment after another.

But in true Caribbean style, Adrian was in no rush. He wanted to stretch this unreal moment as far as possible in the spot where he and his fiancé had never felt so happy and relaxed: under the sea.

“It literally felt like we were in another world,” Adrian says, “so we just kept swimming together.” The shiny ring on her finger inspired Abonée to open her eyes a little wider, as the power of joy propelled Adrian effortlessly through the ocean. He had done it.