Below deck Mediterranean star Captain Sandy Yawn and girlfriend Leah Shafer are engaged after five years of dating.
“Leah wanted the fairy tale, and to me Leah represents elegance. I planned a boat trip to a beautiful bay,” Sandy, 58, said E! News on Monday, September 18 about the proposal. “I had it decorated with flowers and a path to a little table accompanied by three violinists where we could sit and have a little date.”
Sandy added that while she was nervous about the big moment, she “really couldn’t wait” to propose after “thinking about marriage to” Shafer, 49, for years.
“I shared my vision list of love that I had written and wanted, and then got down on one knee. Then she said ‘Yes!’ The look on her face was priceless and my heart exploded!” she recalled. “It was filled beyond anything I could have ever imagined. Somehow I feel closer than before, and I can’t explain it. There is an energy that I have never experienced in my life. I love her more.” ; as Leah says, Yawn out there.”
The couple met in 2018 when Shafer reached out to Sandy via social media about her hit Bravo series.
“She sent me a nice message saying, ‘I came across your show, congratulations, many blessings,’” the captain recalled in an interview with The cheat sheet in 2019, noting that the term “many blessings” caught her attention.
Leah – who was previously married Ross Shafer for twenty years – told the newspaper that her connection with Sandy was “absolutely unexpected.”
“It just happened: when you meet another soul that you connect with on such a deep level, it’s inexplicable and so beautiful,” the opera singer said at the time.
Two years into their relationship, Sandy moved to Colorado to be closer to Leah. However, the couple still maintained a long-distance relationship thanks to her work on Below deck. In February, Sandy opened up We weekly exclusively about how she and Leah were determined to make their romance work, even though they weren’t always in the same place.
‘We’ll find out. We are madly in love,” Sandy said Us. “Leah and I were just in Miami together and I thought, ‘We need to go once a month. We need that time.’ We’re three-day people. So three days is perfect and that’s our goal. In those three days it’s all about us and the phones are off, which is great.”
