SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Calif. — A wedding ceremony can be stressful. One groom felt even more anxiety when he dropped his bride’s wedding ring into a lake as they recited their vows on a California dock.
Andrew Kent was about to slide a ring onto his bride’s finger during a Lake Tahoe waterside ceremony at Sugar Pine Beach on March 12 when the ring slipped from his hands, KTXL reported. The diamond band fell through a crack in the pier and into the frigid water of the second-deepest lake in the United States, SFGate.com reported.
“It was going off without a hitch and I was thinking in my head, ‘No weddings just go without a hitch, or did we just crack the code,’” the bride, Marlee Kent, told KTXL.
The couple, who live in Vancouver, Washington, travel to Lake Tahoe every summer and were getting married five years to the day after they first met, the Tahoe Daily Tribune reported.
Andrew Kent said his first thought was to jump into the lake and retrieve the ring, but their minister, area resident Sharon Rusk, told him the water was too cold and talked him out of taking the chivalrous lover’s leap, the newspaper reported.
The lake’s water temperature in March is typically slightly higher than 40 degrees, SFGate reported.
“I had just gone over a part of the ceremony about how marriages can be met with challenges,” Rusk told the Tribune. “Nobody freaked out, when we started back on the ceremony, I brought up the line about challenges again.”
The couple finished their ceremony, with Marlee Kent using a ring on her other hand as a substitute, the newspaper reported.
Andrew Kent was not overly concerned.
“It’s just a thing and there was a reasonable chance we could get it back,” he told the Tribune.
The couple went to dinner and then later went on Facebook, enlisting the help of the Tahoe Scuba Diving group.
Phill Abernathy, the founder of the group, went to work the next day to find the ring.
“It’s one of those, the sooner the better, don’t hesitate,” Abernathy told KTXL reported.
It took 30 minutes, but Abernathy recovered the ring, the television station reported.
“He saved the day, he saved the whole weekend,” Marlee Kent told the Tribune.
“Whether you’re on the top of the mountain or the bottom of the lake, you feel like you’re on top of the world seeing people’s faces light up,” Abernathy told the newspaper.
Now that the ring is safely on his bride’s finger, Andrew Kent can laugh about his fumble.
“(Abernathy) says, ‘Effectively, yeah, you are famous now, but for being a klutz.’” Kent told KTXL. “I was like ‘That’s all right.’”