Harry Andrew Hoffman met Anne Catherine Hardy in 2004 and learned to sail the optimist dinghy, or Opti, during a summer sailing camp in St. Croix.
The dinghy was “the closest to a bathtub with masts and sails,” said Hoffman, who is now an EU within the U.S. Coast Guard in Washington.
His family moved from Tom's River, New Jersey to St. Croix in 2000. The same year, the family who lived in Fort Worth, Texas, began spending summers and school breaks there.
She recalled “I'm jealous of his beautiful blonde ringlet, bigger than Shirley Temple.” He was intrigued by her Texas Twangue.
In 2011, when she was 14, her family began spending the second half of each grade in St. Croix. Because they loved the feelings of the community.
“She was a breath of fresh air,” Hoffman said.
After class they went to practice voyages – he was as a skipper and as her crew – in their crude gear, including a rash guard that protects them from the sun –
“The practice was competitive,” said Hardy, 28, who now works as an analysis manager for operations at The RealReal, an online luxury fashion reseller.
Over the weekend we went out with some of our 20 classmates from Buck Island and Rainbow Beach, often having a snack with mangoes.
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In 2013, during his third grade, he made her in and out of school every day – they lived on the hill next to him – and soon she regularly made him with goat cheese omelettes, usually turkey bacon.
That April they decided to go to Junior Prom as friends, but that changed soon after they flew to Miami for a regatta or yacht race.
They were watching the MTV Video Music Awards in the hotel lounge when they stole their first kiss.
After she returned to Fort Worth in her first semester in her fourth grade, they often spoke on the phone until 3am, and he would take a break from school and visit her. “We were in love very much,” Hoffman said, adding that “we had a complete American experience with the huge high school system at Texas High School,” where we met friends and went to a football game with her.
In the second semester, when she returned to St. Croix, he asked her to a senior prom in a familiar setting – underwater.
“Prom?” He was spray painted on a large canvas with red lettering. He pointed out when he went for scuba diving in Cane Bay on the island.
A week after graduation, he set out for Swab Summer, a boot camp for Coast Guard cadets. She wrote to him every day, and he answered as much as he could. She still has letters in the file cabinet.
“They took me through the summer of swabs,” he said.
Hoffman graduated from the US Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut, with a Bachelor's degree in Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering. Hardy graduated from the scholarship with a bachelor's degree in economics from George Washington University.
After graduating from the academy in 2018, he was assigned to a Coast Guard cutter or ship in Virginia Beach, working as an economic consultant for a company in New York.
For up to three months to the ocean and incommunicado, he picked up trinkets for her in the Caribbean and Central America. While in Virginia's port, he visited her in New York almost every weekend.
In March 2020, when Covid was hit, she packed her bags and stayed with him for a few weeks in Norfolk, Virginia. She never left. “It was an improvisational development,” Hoffman said with a laugh.
A few months later, after he received the orders that would become the basis for Alameda in California, they moved to Oakland and a year later to San Francisco. In June 2023, they returned to the East Coast when they were assigned to Washington's Coast Guard Headquarters.
“We rolled over with it,” Hoffman said. That December, while visiting St. Croix, he proposed their favourite location at West Point on Buck Island.
On March 15th, Eliana L. Schusterbrown, appointed through the American Marriage Ministries, presided over the 143 guests at Castle St. Croix, a former estate on the hilltop of Contessa, built in the 1970s.
After the ceremony they passed through the arch of swords formed by his Coast Guard friends. Afterwards, at the reception, local dishes included fried breadcrumbs, mashed cassava and fresh mahi mahi.
“We had a stilted Moco Johnby man to introduce St. Croix culture to friends,” she said.
Hoffman said: “The conditions were optimal. There was no rain, not clouds in the sky, but a little refreshing. It was a typical hot day in St. Croix, but it was a special day as I was able to marry Annie.”
