Growing Up in St. Croix, He Asked Her to the Senior Prom Underwater

New York Times

28-03-2025

Harry Andrew Hoffman met Anne Katherine Hardee in 2004 while they learned to sail an Optimist dinghy, or Opti, during summer sailing camp in St. Croix, V.I. They were both 8.
The dinghy 'was the closest thing to a bathtub with a mast and sails,' said Mr. Hoffman, 28, now a lieutenant in the U.S. Coast Guard in Washington.
His family had moved to St. Croix from Toms River, N.J., in 2000, the same year her family, who lived in Fort Worth, Texas, began spending summers and school breaks there.
She recalled being 'envious of his beautiful blond ringlets, bigger than Shirley Temple's.' He was intrigued by her Texas twang.
In 2011, when she was 14, her family began spending the second half of each school year on St. Croix because they liked the community feeling.
'She was a breath of fresh air,' said Mr. Hoffman, when she joined his freshman high school class at St. Croix Country Day School, now Good Hope Country Day School.
After classes, they went to sailing practice — he as a skipper and she a crew member — in their scrappy gear, including rash guards protecting them from the sun.
'Practices were competitive,' said Ms. Hardee, also 28, and now working as an analytics manager for operations at the RealReal, the online luxury fashion reseller.
On weekends, they would hang out with some of their 20 classmates on Buck Island or Rainbow Beach, and often snacked on mangoes.
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In 2013, during junior year, he drove her to and from school each day — they lived on neighboring hills — and soon, in exchange for the rides, she regularly made him goat cheese omelets, usually with turkey bacon.
That April, they decided to go to the junior prom as friends, but that soon changed after they flew to Miami for a regatta, or a sailboat race.
They were watching the MTV Video Music Awards in the lounge of their hotel when they stole their first kiss.
After she returned to Fort Worth for the first semester of her senior year, they often spoke on the phone until 3 a.m., and he even took a week off school to visit her. 'We were so in love,' Mr. Hoffman said, adding that he got the 'full American experience in the giant Texas high school system,' where he met her friends and went to a class and a football game with her.
During their second semester, when she returned to St. Croix, he asked her to their senior prom in a familiar setting — underwater.
'PROM?' he had spray-painted in red letters on a large piece of canvas, which he pointed out while they went scuba diving at Cane Bay on the island.
A week after graduation, he left for swab summer, a boot camp for incoming Coast Guard cadets. She wrote him a letter every day, and he replied whenever he could. She still has the letters in a file cabinet.
'They got me through swab summer,' he said.
Mr. Hoffman graduated from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn., with a bachelor's degree in naval architecture and marine engineering. Ms. Hardee graduated cum laude with a bachelor's degree in economics from George Washington University.
In 2018, after graduating from the academy, he was assigned to a Coast Guard cutter, or ship, on Virginia Beach, and she worked as an economic consultant for a firm in New York.
While at sea and incommunicado for up to three months, he picked up trinkets for her in the Caribbean and Central America. While at port in Virginia, he visited her in New York nearly every weekend.
In March 2020, when Covid hit, she packed her bags and went to stay with him in Norfolk, Va., for a couple of weeks. She never left. 'It was an impromptu development,' Mr. Hoffman said, with a laugh.
A couple of months later, after he received orders to Base Alameda in California, they moved to Oakland, and, a year later, to San Francisco. In June 2023, they returned to the East Coast when he was assigned to Coast Guard headquarters in Washington.
'We rolled with it,' Mr. Hoffman said. That December, while visiting St. Croix, he proposed on their favorite spot at the western point of Buck Island.
On March 15, Eliana L. Schuster-Brown, a Universal Life minister, officiated before 143 guests at the Castle St. Croix, once a contessa's hilltop estate built in the 1970s.
After the ceremony, they walked through a sword arch formed by his Coast Guard friends. Later, at the reception, local dishes included fried breadfruit, mashed cassava and fresh mahi mahi.
'We had Moko Jumbie men on stilts to introduce friends to St. Croix culture,' she said.
Mr. Hoffman said: 'Conditions were optimal. No rain, not a cloud in the sky and a little breezy. It was a typical hot day in St. Croix, but a special one because I was able to marry Annie.'