  In the regime of weakly transverse long waves, given long-wave initial data,
we prove that the nondimensionalized water wave system in an infinite strip
under influence of gravity and surface tension on the upper free interface has
a unique solution on $[0,{T}/\eps]$ for some $\eps$ independent of constant
$T.$ We shall prove in the subsequent paper \cite{MZZ2} that on the same time
interval, these solutions can be accurately approximated by sums of solutions
of two decoupled Kadomtsev-Petviashvili (KP) equations.
