just married!

I was bartending at Striper's in the Shallowbag Bay Marina in Manteo. Nate was charter fishing on The Qualifier out of Oregon Inlet and would regularly come in for dinner after work. The very first time I ever waited on him, he had his head down when I walked up to him. I asked how he was doing and as soon as he looked up from under that maroon Fathom hat, I knew exactly what I was looking at, and that was my forever. It took two months of relentless flirting on my part for him to ask for my number, and another three weeks of talking every single day for him to ask me to dinner. We finally had our first date on June 23, 2015; I guess Nate finally realized what he had been missing because he took me out again the very next night and we have been together ever since.

The day before my 26th birthday, Nate took me out on our boat in the lake across from our neighborhood. After a couple hours, Nate says that he is going to cast one more time and then we will go in, since we were meeting my brother for my birthday dinner later. He tells me that he wants to change the color one last time and asks me to open the tackle box at my feet and hand him the blue jig. So I open the box and pick up the blue jig, and the ring was hanging from it. I stared at it, unable to speak, for at least a solid minute before I realized Nate was on one knee in front of me, laughing at me before he asked me to marry him.

We were married on the beach in Isla Mujeres with the cliffs of Punta Sur and the Caribbean Sea behind us. It was a small ceremony of about 15 people, just a few family members and a couple of local friends. Nate had no idea that I actually had a real wedding dress- he thought I was getting married in the 20 dollar dress from Target that I had originally chosen. He turned around as I started down the aisle to "Yours" by Russell Dickerson and was completely surprised. I was crying before I even got to the altar and pretty much never stopped. It was perfect.