USVI Couple Tie the Knot--Underwater

Ready to take the plunge? More and more couples are choosing the US Virgin Islands for destination weddings but when John Santino and Toni Wilson planned their wedding, they opted to go one step further. The couple, who exchanged vows on Saturday, September 13, 2003, planned the world’s largest underwater wedding.

“As a girl, you always imagine what your wedding would be like, but I have to admit that I never imagined it would be held underwater,” says Toni Wilson Santino, a teller at First Bank on St. Croix. “John was the instructor that certified me a year ago, and we just felt that with SCUBA diving being such a big part of his life, it would be great to hold the wedding underwater.”

Held 11 feet below the surface off the Rainbow Beach Club in Frederiksted, St. Croix, the wedding was attended by 106, including bride and groom. (The current record was set on April 12, 2001, with 39 certified divers in Key Largo, Florida.)

“Of course this was the biggest event of my life but having quite a few of my friends from the states, my Dad [whom John did not know would be attending], friends from the island, SCUBA, other dive shops, the dive club, and so many people from the diving community here on St. Croix be a part of this was just awesome,” recalls John Santino, a PADI Instructor and Manager of St. Croix Ultimate Bluewater Adventures.

The wedding officiant was Captain John Macy (also known as “Big Beard”). The captain is no newcomer to the wedding world; this marked his 738th wedding, but the first underwater. Wearing a dress white uniform, the officiant joined the “formal” wedding party which included the bride in a white lycra top and shorts with a white veil, weighed down by shells and sea glass and the groom in a black Lycra top and shorts and a bow tie.

Helping to coordinate the underwater wedding were a whole school of “wedding planners,” dive operators St. Croix Ultimate Bluewater Adventures, with the assistance of several other dive shops on St. Croix including SCUBA Shack, SCUBA West and Dive Experience. The couple enjoyed a beautiful sunny day for their ceremony with calm, 85 degree waters and visibility that started at about 100 feet (although it degraded sharply with 106 people trying to kneel in the sand at the same time.)

“The more important thing to us was that John and Toni got married,” says Ed Buckley, owner and operations manager of St. Croix Ultimate Bluewater Adventures. “The second most important thing was that it be done in a safe and fun way. Breaking a Guinness Record was third, but a definite great bonus.”

The paperwork to officially enter the Guinness Book of World Records has been submitted.