Up at 6 a.m. to see a beautiful sunrise and take Madison in by dingy to Gum Neck Landing.

A friendly fisherman
While we were there a fisherman arrived and put his boat in the water. He was heading out to check his crab pots. We chatted with him for quite a while. We told him we thought the canal was beautiful. He said there wasn't much around there, but he liked it. He said came to N.C. about 20 years ago from Delaware where he was a farmer. He ran a charter fishing boat for a while, but he got out of that and now he crabs, fishes for yellow and white perch in the winter, traps muskrats and otter, and catches snapping turtles. Bob asked him if he's retired - he mentioned that he was 70 - and he said he's as retired as he's going to be. "I've got to have something going," he said, grinning. The talk turned to boats and he said he loved the way Carolina wooden boats are built. He told us about a book titled "Carolina Flare" about the Carolina style of boat building. "When I read that book, it just warmed my heart," he said. The conversation moved on to the smoke from the peat fires and he said he thought the one near Gum Neck was started by a farmer burning wheat stubble. Up north, he said, when he farmed, they always turned it in, but the soils are so rich with organic matter along the coast that nobody bothers.

Tyrell County
In Thomas Schoenbaum's 1982 book "Islands, Capes and Sounds," Schoenbaum says Tyrell County, where Gum Neck is located, has the smallest population in the state. "Most of the county is still swampland, excellent wildlife habitat as well as commercial forest land," he writes. "Large corporations such as Weyerhaeuser and First Colony Farms own large portions of the area. And most of the 4,000 people of the county live near the mouth of the Scuppernong River, on the shores of the Albemarle Sound, or to the south, along the upper Alligator River in the residential area of Gum Neck. Tyrell County has been declining in population, and there is little industry apart from that associated with agriculture, forestry, fishing and recreation." There's been little change since 1982, if U.S. Census bureau statistics are any indication, though the population did grow 6.2 percent between 2000 and 2010, from 4,149 to 4,407.

More peat fire smoke
We got underway about 9 a.m. There was little wind, but plenty of smoke from the peat fires. We could see it rising almost the whole way along the Alligator River. We anchored for the night in South Lake near the mouth of the Alligator. We'd read about a boat landing down a short canal that would allow us to take Madison for a walk. It was where the GPS coordinates said it would be, but very hard to spot until you were at the mouth of the canal in the dingy. The guides warn you to look out for bear and we saw evidence, but no bears. We did see osprey and another pair of bald eagles. After we took Madison in and explored a bit in the dingy, I went for a swim, expecting brackish water, but there didn't seem to be much salt in it. It was a lovely anchorage and we enjoyed our dinner in the cockpit, despite the ever-present smoke.