Diving Bell’s a Wedding Bell as Pair Takes Plunge
The bride work black, forgot the ring, and her maid of honor was the best man. Oh, and her marriage Friday was conducted underwater.
In wetsuits and hard hats, Michelle Miller and Jeremy La Salvia sank into the mucky water off a Port of Los Angeles wharf and wiggled into a 3,000-pound industrial diving bell. As they stated their simple vows, loud glub-glubs punctuated the “I Do’s” that were piped up by intercom to the dock and the minister.
“I had trouble hearing the minister during some parts; the bell tends to belch real loud,” said the new Mrs. La Salvia, 28, hugging members of her bridal party.
The couple met about six months ago as classmates across the street at the College of Oceaneering in Wilmington, where students learn to be hard-hat divers who weld, inspect and do other industrial jobs. They spent the past six weeks planning their nuptials.
“We are untraditional, both of us,” said La Salvia, 26. “We were going to get married up in the mountains near my church, but my grandmother couldn’t have made it. So we thought, what about underwater? But it’s not like we got married sky-diving nude. It’s middle-crazy, somewhere between lace and tux and sky-diving naked,” the groom said with a grin.
Their wedding day brought sunny warmth for a 9:45 a.m. service off a scruffy wharf, which held their family, a pack of reporters and a giant crane. It lowered the diving bell into the water. Then, the couple jumped into the harbor and submerged, with fins flipping. From the bottom, they swam up into what looks more like a vertical steel gazebo.
The bell’s dome filled with air that allowed them to breathe without masks or tank. Air was continually fed into the dome via hoses that snaked up to the dock. A camera diver was in the water for the requisite wedding video. Included in the bridal party on the dock were an instructor, three tenders to watch all the air hoses, two people to run the air system and intercom, a backup diver in the event of a problem--and the nondenominational minister.
They had found him in the yellow pages, under Ivy House Wedding Gardens of Inglewood, said the minister, John Crawford. Dressed casually in short sleeves, he said this had been his first underwater wedding. But when your customers find you in the phone book, you are more likely to be marrying the impulsive and eccentric.
“I’ve seen some odd ones,” Crawford said of the wedding business his family founded decades ago. “One time I married a guy in the same day to two different women. Yeah, I did. He came back after the first one and said, ‘I’m thinking I’ve married the wrong one, but I didn’t sign [the license], so I want to marry this other woman instead.’ And he could.”
The vows at Friday’s ceremony were short. Then the wet bride and groom, each of whom had been down a dry aisle once before, surfaced to cheers and a zip-lock bag of flower petals that fluttered onto their rubber suits.
Her four children, ages 2 to 12, scrambled around the dock in swimsuits and Aloha shirts. His grandmother snapped photos from her wheelchair. Her mother wore white polyester pants and a smile. His Army roommate was best man and maid of honor.
When a TV reporter asked for the spelling of her new last name, the bride accidentally added a C in La Salvia, and everyone started laughing. It was that kind of wedding.