We woke up early, excited for the trip ahead. The limo picked us up at 7:30am and took us up to SFO where we checked in with United. We walked down to the first class lounge (we had gotten a 2 for 1 deal on first class seats, so we decided to splurge). It was almost empty, except for parents with two noisy kids. At 9:30 we headed up to the plane and settled into our two seats a the back of the first class cabin. We ate some dinner, had a couple of drinks, then took some Ambien and went to sleep for 8 or 9 hours! Watched a couple of movies: Up the Creek and Shrek 2.

At one point Randy was waiting for the restroom and was talking to two of the flight attendants and said "We're going diving in Australia, we'll probably do 30 dives this week". They clearly didn't hear him very well, since one said "You're doing 30 guys? You're very energetic!" and the other asked "You're diving with 30 dykes?". Everyone had a great laugh once we figured it out!

Landing in Sydney we were able to see the opera house out the window. Immigration and customs were fast. On the advice of our friends JP and Matthew we took a cab from the international terminal to the domestic one; it turns out the bus service takes a lot longer. We then boarded a Virgin Blue flight up to Townsville which arrived at 1pm. In town we dropped off our luggage and then walked around to find something to eat. Things were pretty dead, we finally found a Mexican restaurant that was open. Then we stopped at the Townsville aquarium to get a taste of what we'd be seeing and watch an IMAX movie where it was nice and cool.

We took a cab over to Jupiter's Casino, a hotel adjacent to the marina. Unfortunately we couldn't go in the casino (or even the restaurant) since Rick's shirt had no sleeves. At 6pm the luggage arrived at the Spoilsport and Rick was able to change. We also met Margaret at the dock, one of the other divers. She joined us back at the hotel for some (not so good) dinner.

At 7pm we met the other divers in the lobby: Margaret (Melbourne), Mark (Colorado), Asia (Poland), Marcel (Switzerland), Deborah (Sydney) and Andre (Munich). It was a very international bunch. We were a little surprised that there were only to be 8 of us, since the boat holds 29, but it would turn out to be very much in our favor. Once we boarded the boat we decided to change cabins since the first one had the main generator right below it and was pretty noisy. We had a boat briefing in the lounge, then headed down to our cabin to get some sleep.