A B.C. couple are engaged after an underwater proposal that took more than a year to pull off and required help from expert divers.
Cailin Lindsay, 31, and Maxwel Hohn, 37, grew up in a small community on the Sunshine Coast and went to the same high school, but it wasn’t until more than a decade after they graduated that they met for the first time.
Lindsay left the Sunshine Coast and went on to pursue a career in health care and currently works in underserved communities in northern B.C., while Hohn ended up working for her father, a seafood harvester.
“He was actually working with my dad in commercial diving. They had met and did a few trips out to Haida Gwaii together,” said Lindsay. “They totally hit it off. He took him under his wing, and they got to know each other pretty well."
But her father, John Lindsay, never mentioned he had a daughter.
“He’s pretty protective,” said Lindsay.
When he eventually found out John had a daughter, Hohn reached out to Lindsay and they went on their first date diving together.
“My dad was actually there for it, too,” said Lindsay. “After that moment we were like ‘OK, this is pretty awesome — let's keep doing this’."
That was two and half years ago, and since then the two have fallen in love.
“Having someone that loves diving as much as I do and travelling, she does both of those things as much as I do,” said Hohn. “It’s perfect.”
When he started planning to propose to Lindsay, Hohn knew he had to do something extravagant.
"I wanted to make it on like... an epic scale, and I knew underwater would be a good place to do it,” he said. But, to catch her off guard, he told her he would never propose underwater.
Hohn is an Emmy Award-Winning Cinematographer and he got to work creating the perfect underwater proposal.
“It was about a year and a half in the planning,” he said.
The setting he chose to propose to Lindsay was a dive at one of the world’s most iconic marine sites, the Pillars of Evolution, formerly known as Darwin’s Arch, in the Galápagos Islands.
“It’s one of the most famous dive sites in the world. It's one of the best dive sites that you can ever do, because there's so much life, and there's just so much incredibly cool things that you can see there,” said Hohn.
The elaborate proposal is believed to be the first of its kind at the historic dive site.
Hohn required the help of friends and an expert team at Galaxy Diver Liveboards to make it happen.
The location is not only a difficult dive but also difficult to get to.
“They helped me source a lot of the materials, like the treasure chest and the treasure, and get prints all printed off so that we could laminate them and put them underwater,” Hohn said.
On May 31, they did a few dives in the morning and he decided, based on the conditions, that he would propose on the last dive. The other divers dropped the treasure chest with her ring at a location that the pair would swim to.
Lindsay had no idea everyone with her was in on the surprise.
“We get into the water, and the current is absolutely raging. It's like the strongest current we've had in our entire time that we we've ever been to Galápagos,” said Hohn.
The couple had to hold onto rocks to stay in one place and Hohn started questioning if this was the right time to propose.
But they carried on and he started searching for the location.
"I get down, and I'm like, 'Oh my god. Like, I can't remember where the chest is,’" he recalled. "I don't remember which rock it was hidden behind."
But then Lindsay spotted a sea turtle and told the group to come over.
Right beside it was the treasure chest.
“Everyone from our group that we had been diving with for the whole week was there and they had their cameras pointing,” said Lindsay.
She was confused and looked down and saw the chest, thinking it was strange and possibly a movie prop.
"I finally open it, and there are photos of us and that's when I knew,” she said. “I immediately went into shock and my mask started filling up with tears, and yeah, everything kind of slowed down.”
The divers behind her managed to hold up signs, despite the strong current, that read "will you marry me?"
Lindsay said she was crying so hard that her mask flooded and the pair held hands for the rest of the dive.
“She was in so much shock and so happy, and she's nodding yes, and I gave her the ring," Hohn said, after which everything was "just kind of a blur.”
The two shared a kiss underwater.
Everything was so beautiful, Lindsay said.
"I was so worried the current was going to rip the ring off my fingers. I was like, clutching it the whole time,” she says. “I went through my air really fast — I was hyperventilating into my regulator.”
Hohn said he couldn’t have pulled off the dive without the help of his amazing friends Steve Woods, Nicole Holman, Julio Salvatori, Jorge Jurado and the crew at Galaxy Dive Expeditions.
The engaged couple now live in Royston on Vancouver Island and can’t wait to continue their life of adventure, above and below the surface.
"It's going to be pretty hard to top this as a proposal,” said Hohn.
