Wedding ring falls into Lake Tahoe during wedding ceremony; retrieved by scuba diver

LAKE TAHOE - For one couple, when it came time to exchange rings during their wedding ceremony, things didn’t go as planned.

Andrew and Marlee Kent, from Washington state, were getting married on a dock at Lake Tahoe when the groom accidentally dropped the ring intended for his bride’s ring finger.

"Oh no. Oh my God. It went through," Marlee was heard saying in video capture during the picturesque ceremony.

Up until then, she said everything was operating according to plan.

"It was going off without a hitch," she explained to KTXL, "and I was thinking in my head like, ‘No weddings just go off without a hitch, or did we just crack the code?’"

However, when Andrew took the box holding the Tiffany diamond ring, he opened it and the ring fell through a crack in the dock – right into the freezing cold Lake Tahoe.

"Honestly, I thought, this can’t be happening," Marlee said. "Like, that didn’t just happen."

"Like, what are the chances?" Andrew added.

The ceremony paused as Marlee and Andrew frantically tried to come up with a plan to get it back.

"Andrew was like, ‘I am getting in,’" Marlee recalled.

But the minister convinced him not to because of how cold the water was. So, the ceremony continued with the sinking ring still on their mind.

After the wedding, the newlyweds went to Facebook for help and found Phill Abernathy, the founder of "Tahoe Scuba Diving." The next day, Abernathy went to work. After 30 minutes of moving rocks, he found it.

"Hey guys, I have one last question," Abernathy recalled saying to the couple. "Does your ring look like this?"

In his hand, was the ring. 

Courtesy: Phill Abernathy

"We have a memory of a lifetime," Marlee said.

The couple is from Vancouver, Washington, but they visit Lake Tahoe regularly and say future visits are going to be even more special.