Huge thanks to Mathias for sending in this great story… we’ll let him tell it in his own words…

It all began when I was best man for a friend of mine. It was at his wedding that I met Jennifer for the first time and you can guess the rest. We travelled between our two countries for 4 years before I took the plunge and moved from Germany to Ireland. But not only that. With Jennifer being an avid scuba diver and instructor, I also took the plunge into the underwater world and gave it a go myself.

Diving has since become a big part of our lives and I was playing around with the idea of proposing under water for quite some time. However, with Ireland going into lockdown in mid October and no access to any dive sites within 2 km, 5 km or even 20 km the plan was under threat of going into hibernation for the rest of the year. When it was announced that countrywide travel would be allowed for the Holiday period a small window of opportunity opened just at the weekend before Christmas. Desperate to get another dive in this year, it didn’t need too much convincing to schedule a day trip to the west.

Though, before I felt confident enough to go ahead there was a need for a ring. But not just any ring. Jennifer feels the cold and therefore is never seen on a dive without her beloved O’Three mitts so the ring needed to fit not just one but three fingers.

To achieve the perfect fit, I got the mitt in question, a strip of the emergency blanket from the car and two cable ties from the dive box and made the ring myself. Now we were ready to head for the stunning Atlantic coast to Scubadive West in beautiful Connemara.

The surface temperature was about 7° and as we went into the water hailstones were accompanying us. Just the right weather to dive down into the “warm” sea at 9°.

On the return leg from the wreck that we were exploring I found a sandy patch to kneel down and get the ring out of the drysuit pocket that I had clipped on to a D-ring with a double-ender before the dive.

Given the environment that we were in, there was no lengthy speech that could have gone wrong so I hoped that my made-up dive sign of “marrying” would get the message across. Two “Okay” signals, one with each hand, that I would join together to interlocking rings looked convincingly enough on the surface… but now my hands were covered in gloves and the gaps between the rings were more or less filled completely with neoprene. Sticking to the protocol, I got a confirming “Okay” signal back before we shared a kiss. I suppose the silent proposal had worked.

Back on the surface the clouds had opened and revealed some blue sky with the dramatic reddish light of the setting sun in the air.

Mathias Schwaß