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With this fin . . .
By KEITH ST. CLAIR "I do," a Port Richey couple says while surrounded by family, friends -- and sharks. It started as a joke. A radio station announced a contest in which the winners would get married in the Florida Aquarium's shark tank, so Amanda Williams figured she would enter. After all, she and Bill Brown had been engaged for five years. Her biggest fear, she said, was planning a wedding. What scared Brown was the sharks. Although he and Williams are certified divers, the Port Richey couple haven't really done that much diving, said Brown, 29. In fact, they've lived in the area for two years and never even gone diving in the gulf. Why? "Because there's sharks," Brown said Thursday. "I do spring diving where there's nothing following me with sharp teeth." Her fiance's fear didn't stop Williams from entering the contest. "I thought it would be funny that I'd tell Bill, 'Ha, ha, honey, I signed us up to get married in a shark tank,' " said Williams, 31, who met Brown while they worked together for a travel agency in Phoenix. She wrote a short statement on why they should be selected for the "Extreme Wedding," then e-mailed it to WWRM-FM 94.9. "Then they called and told us we were one of five finalists," Williams said. "At this point I thought, 'I'm dead.' " Brown's jaw dropped at the news, but he wasn't angry. And he wasn't that worried -- yet. "I figured there's only a one-in-five chance of actually having to go through with it," he said. The finalists' entries, essays of 50 words or less, were posted on the station's Web site, and the public cast 18,000 votes in three days. Tuesday, the station's morning drive team of Chadd and Kristi was about to announce the winners on-air. As Brown and Williams were getting ready to head to their jobs as travel consultants in Tampa, the phone rang. "I thought, 'Oh no, it's them,' " Brown recalled. Their entry had won in a landslide, with 42 percent of the vote. Friday morning, the couple took the plunge. In some ways, the wedding bore quite a resemblance to a typical ceremony. Thirty or so friends and family members gathered amid flowers and cameras. The bride and groom were kneeling, gazing into each other's eyes and stealing glances at the crowd. The similarities ended there. These guests watched from an observation area outside Shark Bay. The bride and groom were inside, wearing matching black wetsuits and wired for sound. Also in the tank were two dive masters and about a dozen or so predators, including zebra, sand and black tipped reef sharks that circled lazily, at first showing little interest in the bridal party. A diver's stress level often can be gauged by listening and watching the air bubbles being expelled from the regulator. The more stress, the noisier the breathing and the greater the number of bubbles. Friday morning, the groom was blowing a lot more bubbles than the bride, breathing loudly and sounding eerily like Darth Vader. The ceremony itself went swimmingly. The couple quickly exchanged vows; a notary pronounced them husband and wife. As they finished, a 5-foot sand tiger shark came in for a closer view, gliding right above the couple's heads. And the almost first to kiss the bride was a 4-foot sea turtle that swam right in front of their faces. "That turtle seemed to be taking up a lot of the view," Brown joked after the ceremony as he stood dripping in his wetsuit at a staging area outside the top of the tank. In the end, the joke seemed to be on his bride. He had made it through the wedding just fine, spending nearly all his time in the water eyeing her rather than the tank's regular occupants. He spoke like a man who had faced his fear and beaten it. "The sharks are just really big cats and dogs . . . with sharp teeth," Brown said, fingering a jagged chopper he had picked up in the tank as a souvenir. "Really sharp teeth." For informationFriday's wasn't the first underwater wedding at the Florida Aquarium, but it was the first in Shark Bay, where a "Dive With the Sharks" program opened to certified divers last month. For information, call (813) 367-4005, or go to www.flaquarium.org.
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