Same place, Smaller party, New Year!

One of my best friends from college, Ameena, had a friend who was in Mark's fraternity. Ameena and I went to a few parties at the fraternity house. Mark and I met a couple times at some of his parties over the year prior. On the night that started it all, Ameena and I showed up to his house, thinking that they may be having a party. There were a few people just hanging out in the living room and we asked "you guys having a party tonight?". Mark's response was "sure". We picked up a couple cases of Nati and decided to play some drinking games at the house. I gave him my number and he called a couple days later, while I was shopping with my girlfriends. He was looking for someone to go skiing with the following weekend and remembered that I snowboarded. My car got snowed in, so we never made it to the ski hill that winter. Instead we watched one of his favorite ski movies, Out Cold. It was one of my favorite nights in college. A lot of great friendships started that night, with one of them being with Mark. Ten years later, Mark and I still watch Out Cold at the start of every ski season.

I remember talking to our friend, Emily, telling her that I wanted to propose underwater. We were heading to the Cayman Islands and she suggested that would be the perfect time. I spent some time trying to put something together with the resort to have things prepared ahead of time.  Unfortunately, the manager was not much help and just told me to talk to the boat captain when I arrived. I told myself, if I could not figure something out ahead of time, that the beach would be a great alternative.  So day one came and went. Day two came without any plan. Day three, I started talking to one of the guys that was diving on our boat that week. He had been taking some great pictures of our dives and told him what I was thinking about doing. He was so excited about the idea and helped me set up the scene.  After we came up with the plan, we told the boat captain. He ended up stopping at three different sites prior to finding one without current. We ended up going to a rarely dove site, called the Wilderness. I started to stress out because now I needed to convince Nicole that we needed to follow the group to make the plan come together. The guy was going to give me the super secret signal, aka him taking a picture of his wife and wave us over.  Who wouldn't want their picture taken underwater? To my surprise, she suggested that we follow the group. Yes!! One thing I didn't need to worry about. We got ready to get in the water and I walked to the edge of the boat.  Nicole looked at me and asked "are you ready?"  I said "of course!".  Apparently, she noticed that I had forgotten my fins.  The rest of the dive was a blur. i remember seeing the guy taking a picture and swam directly to him and right into the sand to kneel, hoping that she would be able to understand what I was doing with the ring. It took her a little bit, but she finally got it. You could audibly hear her laughing underwater as she was nodding her head "YES!!"