‘Love at first splash’ leads to couple’s wedding on water

Press, 10 October 1984, Page 2

‘Love at first splash’ leads to couple’s wedding on water

NZPA-AP San Onofre, California The bride wore form-fitt-ing white, the groom donned top hat and tails, and both were more than a bit wet by the time they were joined in matrimony on surfboards 800 metres off shore. The ocean seemed to be the preferred habitat of most of the 150 guests who paddled out on surfboards on Monday to attend the unusual nuptials of two lifeguards, Greg Page, of San Clemente, California, and Kara Webber, of New Zealand.

“We are going to catch waves all over the world,” said an exuberant Mr Page, aged 29, after a ceremony in which the ring-bearer was a scuba diver who emerged from the deep

bearing twin bands and then quickly disappeared back into the ocean. “I have known of people getting married under water,” said Mr Page’s boss, a San Clemente lifeguard, Captain Lynn Hughes, who chose to watch from his Bostoh whaler anchored nearby. “But this is the first wedding I have seen on the water.”

Mr Page, a San Clemente City lifeguard for the last 10 years, met his bride-to-be two years ago when he went to New Zealand in a lifeguard exchange programme sponsored by the West Coast Lifeguard Association.

Miss Webber, aged 20, was then a lifeguard at the Orewa Surf Club near Auckland. “It was love at first

splash,” joked [one of the wedding guests.i The new Mrs Page said the couple decided to get married on surfboards at sea because her parents could not travel to southern California. i “It was the j closest we could get to New Zealand if we did it on I the water. It’s the same ocean,” she said. The couple held a second ceremony on shore, sifting the black sand of Kara’s favourite beach in New Zealand together with the white sand of San Onofre, a coastal ccommunity on the northern border of San Diego County about 95km south-east of Los Angeles. Guests at the surfboard ceremony paddled out past the surf line, | some with small children 1 hanging on tight. A grinning page followed, and then Miss Webber, who wore a white swim suit and a waistlength net veil, paddled out flanked by two friends.

Mr Page’s father, a Universal Life Church minister, Richard Page, read the vows from his surfboard. Most members of the group hung on to lines from Captain Hughes’s boat to keep from drifting off. Afterwards jthe tanned couple were showered with salt water instead of the traditional confetti. Then the bride left her zebrastriped surfboard to join her husband on a board for two, and they paddled off together. “A couple who can paddle together like that can never go wrong,” Captain Hughes said.