I wake with a start. Fish and corals swirl into the ceiling fan above my bed. The sleep recedes and it slowly dawns on me that my dream is real - I am about to sink to 60 feet, and not to return for 10 days!

A week ago, we arrived at the NOAA-NURC facility to begin our preparations and training for the current mission. It seems a life-time ago, since I nervously submitted to the physical tests required for qualification as an Aquanaut. I passed - perhaps beyond all expectations. After a week of training with Mark Hulsbeck and Paul Masaki, our confidence has grown and our underwater home no longer looms as an unknown. The lectures and drills have placed us in the perfect for handing the complexity of living under the sea at 60 feet. The instruction has been second to none. These are truly professional underwater trainers.

I am ecstatic with my team. My fellow Aquanauts Sarah Lee (USA), Bill Leggat (Australia) and Josh Idjadi (USA) are great people - we have shared many moments together already and I am under the impression that I couldn't be teamed up with a better bunch of Aquanauts for this mission. We are a tight-knit but fun team. These other members are strong and competent yet I can't count the times that we (the saturation, trainers and support team) have slapped our sides as one of the other has dropped a dry but cutting observation on another's skill execution! It is also a load of fun!

The mission begins tomorrow. At 8:30 am tomorrow, we will enter the water (7 miles off Key Largo) and will not surface for another 10 days. Peter Edmunds and Ruth Gates (principal investigators and leading the top-side support team) have done an excellent job at organising the science program. We collected our first larvae yesterday, which is an excellent indication that we will be seeing lots of spawning in the days to come as the moonlight dims and Florida's corals undergo their annual reproduction cycle. Only 1000 people have saturated before through the US program and we will be the 63rd NURC mission ever - quite something seeing the first missions began long ago in the sixties. The chance to dive to 130 feet and stay there for long periods will open up new insights into the biology of coral reefs for our team.

Each of us feels that we are on the doorstep of the great unknown - a chance to live with our beloved marine creatures in a way that each of us has never known. We literally can't wait - tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow!