THERE'S TREPIDATION, just a bracing shot, as I shove off from the muddy tip of Ocracoke, the southernmost barrier island in North Carolina's Outer Banks. While an extravagant 11 feet six inches long, my stand-up paddleboard always seems even more capacious in my imagination, a houseboat to be outfitted with a lounge chair and wet bar. But as I bend to my seven-foot paddle, my feet working for equilibrium, the shore recedes and the SUP suddenly assumes its true dimensions, insignificant in the vastness of Pamlico Sound—and pretty darn tippy with sharks about.

But that's just anxiety short-circuiting the mind-feet relationship. I'm a beginner, but I know this much: SUPs respond to every ripple; you just have to talk back with your toes. Relax and the motion becomes caressing, addictive, the board an extension of the feet, the paddle an extension of the hands, the whole a harmonious unit standing tall and making good time. That's the theory, anyway.

Pamlico is ripping right along at about five knots, disorienting to watch—unbalancing, even—while perched atop an oversize surfboard. Happily, the flow is going more or less my way. I seem to float in place while the globe spins under my feet, sea grass thrashing as if in a tempest, sprats and rays and crawling things bolting at my approach. The SUP nods its nose agreeably, kissing off the velvet wakes of unseen vessels, and I find my rhythm, poling yet deeper into the early-morning fog, leisurely dipping my paddle now and again to correct my course. I hope. The fog obscures the land, but this feels like northeast, and over that way lie Cape Hatteras and the Diamond Shoals: the Graveyard of the Atlantic.

I've launched at first light to make a two-mile crossing of the Hatteras Inlet and then paddle on some ten miles up the seaward coast of Hatteras Island, where bigger waves roll. I may have a paddle, but I'm a surfer, and I want to see what this brute can do. I'm on the first leg of a six-day solo trip: Ocracoke to the great sand dunes of Nags Head, about 70 miles total, in and around the natural amusements of 30,320-acre Cape Hatteras National Seashore. I'll admit to being a little spooked by Pamlico's immensity, under cover of fog, and the many unknowns: wind, currents, lightning, and, especially, my competence.

What I had in mind, in my pre-trip fantasizing, was a nautical update of the classic TV western—Maverick, say, or Cheyenne—with my SUP as seafaring horse. All I'd need, really, was my trusty paddle, a canteen, and a drybag. Riding from beach town to beach town, I'd change lives and learn shit. Come August, I strapped my 45-pound paddleboard to the roof of my truck and headed up from my home, outside Tallahassee, Florida, to the Outer Banks, where I hadn't been since a memorable teenage surf trip 30-odd years ago. Exposed as they are to deeper water and every whim of weather, the Outer Banks are the likeliest place on the East Coast to find summer surf, offering endless uncrowded beach breaks and a string of little towns, each about a day's paddle from the last.

So far, so good on the shakedown cruise. The drybag, bungeed to the foredeck, isn't slowing me down a bit. I'm comfortably balanced, pivoting at the hips to put my whole upper body into the strokes, and have started looking forward to some sort of trouble. Will powerful currents sweep me miles out to sea? Just let 'em try! I'm approaching the issue of tides on a "need to know" basis, and I figure I don't need to know. I have my schedule; they have theirs. More ominous is the beehive pile of black clouds mounting to the north.

A HORN BLAST SOUNDS behind me. I swivel, tottering, nearly falling. Here comes the Hatteras–Ocracoke ferry, with a bellyful of summer tourists and vehicles. I quick-stroke out of the channel and onto the nearby flats, skimming about two feet above a grassy bottom, spooking flatfish. The ferry passes about 300 feet to starboard, and I wave my paddle to a couple of surfers who've solved a thorny logistical problem by volunteering to take my truck across the inlet. We'll rendezvous at the Frisco Pier sometime in the P.M. If I don't show, they'll call the Coast Guard.

Can I paddle all day? I don't know. So much depends on the wind. You want an offshore breeze, however hard it cares to blow, and a tailwind, of course, if you're going somewhere. Well-spaced swells are a hoot, but a little onshore cross-chop can kick novice butt. Falling is part of the game—fun, even, in moderation—but falling repeatedly erodes morale and eventually exhausts. And if the weather and waves do their worst, I plan to just hunker down and hold on, like a barnacle.