The Private Island By J.V., December 2001 Playing Castaway on PSV. Twelve million tourists visited the Caribbean last year, but only a thousand of them made it to Petit St.Vincent (PSV). The southernmost part of St.Vincent and the Grenadines, PSV is a verdant, reef-ringed, privately owned isle with a single resort that offers hiking, fishing, snorkeling, sailing, windsurfing, kayaking, and diving. And solitude. The average number of guests on the island at any one time is 35, and PSV’s owners like to brag that you can go a week without seeing any of them. Every form of refuge has its price, and on exclusive PSV, it’s $585 a night at this time of year. That gets you and a companion one of the resort’s 22 secluded bungalows, each with an unobstructed view of jade and aquamarine seas, room service that can be summoned by raising a flag (there are no phones or TVs), and a patio with a hammock. Peel yourself out of that and you can walk the trails that meander through the tropical forests of the hilly, 113-acre island or hike the two miles around it on undeveloped beaches fronted by palm and sea grape trees. The action, though, is out in the water. A two-mile-long barrier reef encircling most of the isle protects smaller patch reefs within easy wading distance, where the opportunities for snorkeling rank with the best in the Caribbean. You can also explore by kayak, sailboat, or “spyak” - a craft with a see-through bottom. It’s a five-minute motorboat ride to Mopion, an islet of bright white sand that could have inspired the desert-island cartoons in The New Yorker. On a daylong, guided catamaran trip, you can cruise in brisk 10- to 15-knot winds along the inside of Carriacou Reef or to a spot discovered by local guide Glenroy Adams – Mayreau Gardens. There you can dive down to green and purple corals, swim past angelfish and nurse sharks, and check out a bubbling volcanic hot spring. “The spring isn’t a place on the map or anything,” Adams says. “Nobody else knows where it is.”