Jim & I met working on a superyacht in Italy (Cheers Ryan and Shanny for hiring me). When you join yachting you're told not to 'screw the crew'. Well, we tried and we failed. But now we're getting married! During our relationship we have done mostly everything backwards from first living and working together to more recently working in different parts of the world and spending months apart. But as they say distance makes the heart grow fonder and we are now looking forward to spending the rest of our lives together.

I think the sunrise on the 18th Oct was sheer luck in my eyes but clearly my most memorable. In Oct Bree and I were flying to NZ from France for our holidays. In the pre holiday planning excitement I had pushed the idea of getting up early one morning to go and watch the sunrise at the beach. Being from West Aus a sunrise over the ocean is a rare one to see plus that made for a convincing argument and so Bree was keen. Little did she know that over the few months prior I had picked out an engagement ring from a local jeweller and sorted to pick it up on the way to Bree's house from the airport. May I add that I am useless at booking flights which meant we parted ways in Dubai, travelled to Auckland separately with me landing 5hrs later and left to navigate Aucklands shitty traffic alone. As fate would have it it turned out to be a genius plan (even though by accident) as I had time alone to find the jeweller and get the ring without Bree suspecting a thing. Now from what I remember talking before hand Bree seemed keen to watch the sunrise at some point during our holiday and I was excited at that time to drop the knee but when the alarm went off on a pretty crisp Orewa morning I don't think Bree was too keen on the idea. I figured id be nice and romantic but 5.50am alarms on the first day of holidays made for a pretty quiet walk down to the beach and at this point Bree wasn't up for holding hands I know that. When we got the beach the sky was lighting up in colour and I really couldn't have picked a better morning. We have such a comfortable relationship but when that sun started appearing I suddenly got nervous. Bree is someone that I love so much and can talk to about anything but now my knees have a little shake to them and a lump appears in the throat and any pre planned speech I had disappears. Im not too sure exactly what I said but all I know is that she put aside the cold and the early rise and said yes on our favourite morning so far.