By Jon Bowermaster

updated 11:01 a.m. ET Jan. 28, 2008

St. Vincent on an early Sunday morning. The streets of Kingstown are filled with elegantly dressed men and women headed for church. The windshields of most of the taxis boast GOD IS GREAT decals. But my guide, Rafton "Tall Boy" Cordice, is headed for a different kind of worship, involving an afternoon of rice and beans, rum and Hairoun beer, sunshine and blue seas.

Thanks to an impending hurricane and airline incompetence, I've been stranded here and missing my bags — including my folding kayak — for several days. Tall Boy, who seems to know every last soul on St. Vincent, has turned out to be a godsend, escorting me to the highlights and regaling me with island trivia. The father of 20 — with a full head of black hair that belies his 72 years — has been driving me up and down the coast and to the base of the 4,000-foot La Soufrière volcano, which last erupted in 1979.

St. Vincent is to be my jumping-off point for a kayaking tour of the Grenadines, the 32-island chain at the confluence of the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean just north of Grenada. It's a diverse bunch: St. Vincent is home to 100,000 of the chain's 119,000 population and feels like a mini Jamaica; Mustique is renowned as a playground of the rich and discourages mass tourism; Mayreau is the tiniest of inhabited islands, home to fewer than 200 people, a single unnamed village, and one of the most beautiful beaches in the Caribbean; and Tobago Cays' five uninhabited islands are protected as a marine reserve and are famous for having been a location for Johnny Depp and his pirate gang.

Like the tightly bunched British Virgin Islands, the Grenadines — stretching just 45 miles north to south — are the ideal place for the kayaking adventure I envision: short crossings in the morning, luxuriating on wide powdery beaches in the afternoon, sleeping in air-conditioned comfort. Traveling by kayak requires endurance, patience, and spontaneity. But I regard sea level as the best perspective from which to comprehend island life, and the kayak as the most ingratiating of vessels.

After all the hurricane hullabaloo, Dean passes to the north, ripping through St. Lucia. But still I have no bags, so I leave Tall Boy and board the ferry to nearby Bequia (pronounced BECK-way). Seated under an awning in the back of the boat on an 85-degree day, I am delighted to be out on the water — with or without a kayak.

Christoper Wray-McCann / CondeNast Traveler A heart-shaped tree is the backdrop for beachside dinners at Palm Island, a private-island resort in the southern Grenadines.

Bequia is compact, hilly, and covered with bougainvillea, cactuses, frangipani, and oleander. Historically, its industries were boatbuilding, fishing, and whaling, all of which persist to this day. The island's proximity to a migratory path of the humpback made it an important whaling station throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Today, by agreement with the International Whaling Commission, locals can cull a total of four whales a year, although few hunters possess the necessary skills, which include throwing harpoons by hand from small open boats. On those rare occasions when a hunter is successful, the whale is towed to Semplers Cay for butchering.

"No hate. No crime," says Elson Hackshaw, who meets me at the dock and offers to show me around. "That's why I like it here. I haven't left the island in four years." Hackshaw, who has coal-black skin and pale-blue eyes, wears a striped polo shirt pulled (barely) over an expansive belly, yellow sweatpants, and sandals; his ride is a pickup truck with a CB radio, which he uses to chat with his wife as we drive.

Like most natives of Bequia, Hackshaw is a mélange of Norwegian, Portuguese, and Scottish, mixed with African as a result of the slave trade. I've asked him to drive me to Park Bay, on the Atlantic side of the island, site of Orton "Brother" King's Old Hegg Turtle Sanctuary, started in 1995 to raise endangered hawksbill hatchlings rescued from neighboring islands. The turtles are nurtured at Old Hegg until they are three years old and then are released into the sea.

The sanctuary sits at the edge of an old coconut plantation. As we pull in, an elderly woman is burning coconut husks in a small grill, readying coals to bake breadfruit. Under a nearby metal roof, several hundred endangered hawksbills live in neat man-made ponds. The wild Atlantic pounds the coast just 50 feet away.

Brother King comes out of his adjoining house wearing a frayed cap, a worn blue-and-white flowered flannel shirt, and sun-faded khakis. He is patrician handsome, tan, and leathery. "These are the most intelligent migratory animals on the planet," says King. "Put the babies into the ocean and even if they travel a thousand miles they'll swim back here to the beach where they were born to lay their eggs. Incredible, don't you think?"

King is frustrated that he can't get more help protecting the turtles. "I've had the prime ministers of Antigua and Dominica come here and tell me how important my work is, but I can't get a government anywhere to help protect them, either with laws or with money. All I can do is try to change the attitude of the kids. We bring all the schoolchildren here on field trips. We talk to them about returning the turtles to the wild so that the population can grow again, and we hope that they won't turn out to be turtle hunters. But it's hard. Once I had a magistrate visiting whose job it was to enforce the laws of the land, and he asked me if he could buy one of my turtles for soup. I joked with the policeman who'd driven him here, 'Arrest this man!' But I was serious. How am I going to change attitudes, and laws, if the lawmakers and law enforcers don't take this seriously?"

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