He floated a proposal, she said yes

Boat names tend toward the clever and the sentimental, and Mike Biever’s is no different.

He unveiled the boat’s name — Will You Marry Me? — when proposing to his longtime girlfriend Caitlin Bloomer Friday, July 10, at the Port Washington marina.

He had covered the name of the boat with a towel, and when Bloomer lifted it and turned, she found Biever on one knee, ring in hand.

“I thought the boat would do the asking for me,” Biever said. 

“I was just really shocked, thinking is this really happening?” Bloomer said. “It was a complete surprise — I would have worn a different outfit if I had known.”

So he asked the question, and she replied “Yes.”

But before he could put the ring on her finger, Bloomer “snatched it out of the box.”

“She did not want it to fall in the water,” Biever said, laughing.

“I didn’t even let him put it on my finger,” his fiancee said.

The moment was captured for posterity by Biever’s father Jim, the former photographer for the Green Bay Packers.

And other boaters in the marina applauded the happy couple.

“A lot of the other boats were honking their horns,” Bloomer said.

Mike Biever, a global commodity manager for Rexnord who lives in Saukville, has owned the 24-foot-long boat for three years but hadn’t previously named the vessel.

Biever said the idea to propose using the boat had its genesis in a Christmas gift exchange with Bloomer’s family two years ago. Her sister’s gag gift to him was a suggestion he name the boat Caitlin Maria.

“I told her, ‘This is the worst gift ever. You can’t name someone else’s boat,’” Biever said.

He’s taken a lot of flack for that through the ensuing years, he said.

“I needed to make up for that comment,” Biever said.

Caitlin Maria is what she expected to see when she unveiled the boat name, Bloomer said.

Bloomer, a dentist in Kiel, grew up on Lake Winnebago and “has been boating her whole life,” Biever said.

So when he decided to propose, Biever said, he tweaked the idea to come up with a creative way to ask the question using the couple’s shared hobby.

On the appointed date, Biever enlisted his dad’s help to set everything up, affixing the sticker with the boat’s name and loading the boat with champagne and such.

He invited Bloomer out for a sail, and the rest is history.

The couple is currently trying to figure out a wedding date, perhaps a destination wedding around Memorial Day or in fall 2021, Biever noted.

Will You Marry Me? isn’t a permanent name for the boat, Biever said. 

“We’re going to leave this on there as long as it lasts,” he said, adding they hope it will remain intact through the summer.

Then, he said, the boat will be renamed the Caitlin Maria.