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of sticks that mark the home of osprey and their offspring. October is too late for young to be in the nests, but sometimes an adult glares down its curved beak at us as we motor by, or one soars overhead, a fish clutched in its talons.
    And all along the waterway, herons stand stick-still in the shadows at the shoreline, flapping off with an annoyed
skronk
once they realize they’ve been spotted. Mistletoe decorates the treetops in the Alligator River in North Carolina, a novelty for northerners like us who only see it hanging in doorways at Christmas. We smooch in the cockpit every time we spot it. (Now I know how boating accidents happen in the South.) When Steve yells “dolphin” on the Pamlico River, I snap to attention but don’t see anything, and I’m sure it’s just a trick: He realized I had my eyes closed behind my sunglasses and was trying to put an end to my mid-morning nap. But, no, a slick gray back curves above the surface ahead of us, and soon three bottlenose dolphins are whistling by alongside, alternately diving and arcing, crisscrossing our bow wave with syncopated grace.
    The water is a just-polished mirror as we motor down Russell Creek toward Beaufort, North Carolina. Suddenly it’s broken by twenty or thirty fins: dolphins all around us this time, curving into the air in a slow-motion ballet that continues for half a mile. We are passing through a dolphin nursery area.
    This is what I had hoped for back in Toronto when I finally convinced myself to leave. Even though most stretches of the waterway only require one person on deck to steer, neither of us wants to go below even for a couple of hours to tackle some chore. “Forget it,” I tell Steve. “I might miss something.” Besides, we have a deal—the first one to spot an alligator gets to decide what we eat for dinner for a whole week—and I don’t trust him.
    One night, at anchor in the Neuse River off Oriental, North Carolina, small crackling noises resonate steadily through
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’s hull. It’s a frightening sound, as if her fiberglass is slowly crumbling apart beneath us and the tea-colored river will soon begin pouring through the cabin floor. We search nervously for the problem, lifting up the access panels in the floor so we can inspect the bilges for cracks, and running our hands along the hull at the backs of lockers, checking for dampness. Nothing. The noise continues but we don’t appear to be sinking, so we eventually try to ignore it, have dinner, and start studying the section of the guidebook about the next day’s stretch of waterway. And there it is: Don’t be alarmed, the guide warns, by the “disturbingly loud” noise that “often goes on all night long.” It’s only krill—small, shrimplike creatures—munching the algae off
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’s bottom. “Eat, eat,” says Steve, encouraging them mightily. The more they eat, the less we’ll have to scrub.
    Most nights we anchor in swift-running tidal creeks off the main channel. From our anchorage in Taylor Creek, at Beaufort, I can walk across the barrier island at low tide to the broad beach that faces the Atlantic. Chestnut-colored wild horses with shaggy manes roam the tidal flats, as they’ve done since the forties, when they were put here by a local doctor and left to fend for themselves after he died. Hundreds of shorebirds—sandpipers, sanderlings, ruddy turnstones—scurry past like fast-moving windup toys, as if they know they’ve got limited time to make their rounds before the flats are again covered by the sea. On the beach, I hunt for shells—and find a necklace of fragile white coins, the egg case of a whelk—until I begin to worry that the tide will start rising and strand me.
    Granted, settling into this new way of life is requiring more adjustment than just getting used to not having a two-storey house to rumble around in, with a dishwasher, telephone, TV, VCR, and unlimited supplies of hot water and electricity. I’m a morning person,