Catie and Dan’s Very Smoky Wedding Rehearsal on Vashon Island

To start this post I want to give full disclosure that Dan (the groom) is my son.  Which put me in the rather difficult position of wanting to photograph the wedding, but not really being able to without making things like family photos very difficult.  Plus my wife told me that there was no way she’d allow it, so that pretty much settled things!

Dan and Catie had been working on their wedding plan for several months.  They had decided that they were getting married early in the summer, picked a date (September 12) and location (the beach in front of Catie’s parents’ house on Vashon Island), and started working on their guest list.  We were already a several months into the pandemic, and they realized that their plans for the “perfect wedding” with a large group of friends and relatives just wasn’t going to be possible.  But they figured that the odds were good that they could at least invite their closest friends along with immediate family.  The plan was for everything to be outside, so a group of 30 should be OK.

Of course, we did not come out of Phase Two as hoped.  And with about 6 weeks until the wedding date Catie and Dan had to make a tough decision.  Quite a few of their friends would be traveling from some distance to attend the wedding, and would need to fly.  Dan and Catie weren’t sure that they’d be comfortable asking their friends to fly under the current circumstances, and even if they were OK with it their friends might not be.  So the decision was made to cut the group down to 15, which would include Catie’s parents (Steve and Mary) and her sister (Allie), Dan’s parents (Tom and Sue), his grandfather (John) and his sister (Kerri), one of Catie’s cousins (Mandy), and five friends from college (Hadley, Trudy, Cam Tommy and Andy), one of whom would also act as the officiant who would perform the marriage.

I’m not going to give you the entire pre-wedding rundown, that is an entire blog post all by itself.  So let’s jump ahead to the wedding rehearsal!

The wedding was scheduled for September 12, so the plan was to have a rehearsal on September 11.  That way all involved would know where they needed to be before and during the ceremony.  I have photographed more than 1200 weddings and I warned Dan and Catie that doing the ceremony “cold” with no rehearsal would likely lead to serious problems, and they agreed a rehearsal was a good idea.

Here is where things start getting interesting.  There were many wildfires currently burning in WA, OR and CA, and huge amounts of smoke from the fires had blown into the Seattle area.  When we got onto the ferry for Vashon on Friday morning, the smoke haze was already so thick that visibility was no more than a mile.  And the temperature, which just the day before had been near 90 and was forecasted to be in the mid-80s, was only in the low 70s.

We met up with Dan and Catie at Steve and Mary’s house, and pretty soon all who were there headed down to the beach for the rehearsal.  As you’ll see from the photos below the visibility was quite low, with land on the far side of the bay barely visible.  The smell of wood smoke was quite distinct.

We ran through the rehearsal several times, working on the timing of the music with the movements of the participants.  First Kerri brought the rings down the path to the beach, where she handed them off to Mandy, who was standing in for Hadley, who would be the officiant at the actual ceremony but who had not yet arrived on Vashon.  LOL!  Did that sound confusing enough?  Then Dan and Sue would walk down the beach to the “altar”, formed by a driftwood arch built by Steve.  Finally Steve and Catie would walk down the path to the beach, where Steve would hand Catie off to Dan so the ceremony could begin.

It took a few tries, but finally everything seemed to be figured out.  Here are some photos of the events as they took place.