ST. LUCIA (FSB Magazine) - Standing in the customs line at tiny George Charles Airport, I note a sign inviting me to apply for an official honeymoon certificate from the St. Lucia Tourist Board. The newlywed niche market drives tourism in St. Lucia. Famed Jamaican hotelier Butch Stewart, who practically invented the market, has built three Sandals mega-resorts on the island since 1993, a total of 777 rooms. My wife, Sara, smiles when I point out the sign. Our honeymoon was 21 years ago. The spoon-fed, all-inclusive, couples-only Caribbean vacation is not what we're here for.

Instead we've come down from Boston for a long weekend with our two daughters, ages 12 and 15, and we're staying at the Coco Palm, a new resort hotel on the northwest coast of St. Lucia, near Gros Islet. Owner Allen Chastanet (a St. Lucian native with dual U.S. citizenship), built the hotel to develop a new niche market for St. Lucia: experienced tourists--some 35% of the island's visitors come from the U.S.--of varied means, traveling as families, looking to mix it up with one another and the locals.

The Coco Palm (www.coco-resorts.com) is 15 minutes by taxi from George Charles Airport (one hour from St. Lucia's other airport, Hewanorra International), just off the main road that winds through the tourist enclave of Rodney Bay Village. With 72 rooms and 12 suites, the Coco Palm is smaller than many Caribbean resorts but bigger than a guesthouse. It is the second of three planned properties built by Chastanet that will share pools, restaurants, and a small conference facility. The Coco Kreole, an inn with 20 rooms, is the simplest and least expensive of the three. The Coco Plum, when it opens in 2007, will be the most luxurious. The Coco Palm, literally and figuratively, is in the middle.

While the Coco Palm has a charming poolside restaurant that serves Creole delicacies such as spicy black pudding (made from pig's blood), Chastanet assumes you'll want to explore. He's setting up signing privileges at restaurants all over town. (Our favorite: Spinnakers. It's informal, thatch-roofed, and right on nearby Reduit Beach, facing the sunset. Try the tuna stew.) If you're here in the summer, you can enroll your kids in the Coco's Montessori program. They'll hang out with St. Lucians their own age and take trips around the island.

Chastanet, 45, comes from an old St. Lucian family. (His father, Michael, a shipping and real estate magnate, is routinely referred to as "the prime minister.") Chastanet was educated abroad, worked for USAID in Washington, served as St. Lucia's director of tourism, and was VP of marketing for Air Jamaica before going into the hotel business. He has been around, in other words, and has acquired certain travel peeves, which he is trying to address at the Coco Palm.

For example, he dislikes waiting in line to register after a long day on airplanes. That's why there is no front desk at the Coco Palm. Instead Anna, our floor hostess--each floor has one--greets us on arrival and takes us straight to our rooms. (I give her my credit card later.) "Once you put someone behind a desk, you create a power relationship that doesn't favor the guest," Chastanet says. "And the front desk has two functions, service and administrative. Since administrative is most easily measured, service suffers."

Our two rooms are adjacent but not connecting--Chastanet says it's impossible to make connecting rooms adequately soundproof. Ours has a king and the kids' has two queens, a family-friendly alternating scheme that Chastanet has preserved throughout the hotel. Two-room suites are an option; each comes with iPod speakers and flat-screen TVs.

Hoping to thrill the girls, we have sprung for two of the Coco's very cool swim-up rooms, with steps that lead directly from a private patio into the pool. (Please see box for rates and other information.) Another clever design element in the pool: the wide shallow shelf at one end where parents can bathe with small children and still talk to adults; no more kiddie-pool ghetto.

Anna and the rest of the staff are warm, knowledgeable, and attentive, but because the Coco Palm is new (we visited just weeks after it opened), the staff is still working out a few kinks. It will be better when guests reliably get enough soap and towels to last the whole day and don't have to pay extra for beach chairs--Chastanet says he's on the case.

On day one we head for the beach, a five-minute walk if you know the way (ask Anna). Reduit Beach is a tad narrow and lined with low-rise hotels, and I'm told it gets crowded in season, but that's quibbling--it's gorgeous. The surf on this side of St. Lucia, facing the Caribbean, is calm.

Quickly I learn a valuable lesson, too late to do me any good, but maybe I can spare you: Don't buy jewelry on the first day. "If your father were going to buy you a necklace, which one would you like?" a vendor named Julius asks my daughter Annie. Before I know it, I've outfitted the family in costume beads and polished lava and spent 280 East Caribbean dollars, about $104. But Julius is charming and full of information, and does lead us in a roundabout way to Malakai, so no regrets.

I meet Malakai on my way up the beach to the ATM to get money for Julius. He is bearded and dreadlocked and nearly naked, squatting on his haunches, drawing Stars of David and Rasta hieroglyphics in the sand. We fall into a conversation, and Malakai offers to take me and my family on an all-day excursion in his boat to show us the real St. Lucia ("all natural, no plastic"), cold drinks included, for $440. "EC?" I ask. "U.S.," he says. Wiser now, I tell him that's too much. We agree on $360, half in advance.

At 9:30 the next day, there's Malakai as promised, knee-deep in the surf, gripping the gunwale of a long, pink, wooden canoe with an outboard motor. We head south down the Caribbean coast, hugging the shoreline, past steep green hills that drop straight into the sea, by Castries, the capital city and home of Nobel Prize-winning poet Derek Walcott, to the dock at Canaries, a tiny fishing village not on any tourist itinerary.

Later Malakai takes us to the Pitons, a pair of cone-shaped mountains that rise half a mile above the sea. At Soufrière, we transfer to a taxi for a steep, winding, ten-minute trip to what is reputed to be the world's only drive-in volcano (last major eruption: 1766), where we indulge in a therapeutic mud bath near a warm thermal spring. On the way back we stop to snorkel in the clear bay between the Pitons, lingering so long that we have to hurry to make it back to Reduit Beach before dark.

Tomorrow we'll go horseback riding on the beach (Trims Stables; two hours, $60), even into the ocean, even over the horses' heads. (They paddle like dogs: Who knew?) Later that night my wife and I will get pleasantly buzzed on Pitons beer while the girls sip virgin coladas. But this is the moment I'll always remember: racing home against the setting sun in the wide-open sea, sitting close to my wife on the middle bench of Malakai's boat, gazing at the backs of our windblown, brown-haired girls.

It's the kind of authentic experience you seldom get at all-inclusive resorts such as Sandals. When you interact with locals, you might overpay for jewelry, but you also open yourself up to the possibility of a magical day like the one we had with Malakai. That's how Chastanet himself likes to travel--no limbo contests or all-you-can-eat honeymoon buffets, please. I'm with him.

Standing in the customs line at tiny George Charles Airport, I note a sign inviting me to apply for an official honeymoon certificate from the St. Lucia Tourist Board. The newlywed niche market drives tourism in St. Lucia. Famed Jamaican hotelier Butch Stewart, who practically invented the market, has built three Sandals mega-resorts on the island since 1993, a total of 777 rooms. My wife, Sara, smiles when I point out the sign. Our honeymoon was 21 years ago. The spoon-fed, all-inclusive, couples-only Caribbean vacation is not what we're here for.

Instead we've come down from Boston for a long weekend with our two daughters, ages 12 and 15, and we're staying at the Coco Palm, a new resort hotel on the northwest coast of St. Lucia, near Gros Islet. Owner Allen Chastanet (a St. Lucian native with dual U.S. citizenship), built the hotel to develop a new niche market for St. Lucia: experienced tourists--some 35% of the island's visitors come from the U.S.--of varied means, traveling as families, looking to mix it up with one another and the locals.

The Coco Palm is 15 minutes by taxi from George Charles Airport (one hour from St. Lucia's other airport, Hewanorra International), just off the main road that winds through the tourist enclave of Rodney Bay Village. With 72 rooms and 12 suites, the Coco Palm is smaller than many Caribbean resorts but bigger than a guesthouse. It is the second of three planned properties built by Chastanet that will share pools, restaurants, and a small conference facility. The Coco Kreole, an inn with 20 rooms, is the simplest and least expensive of the three. The Coco Plum, when it opens in 2007, will be the most luxurious. The Coco Palm, literally and figuratively, is in the middle.

While the Coco Palm has a charming poolside restaurant that serves Creole delicacies such as spicy black pudding (made from pig's blood), Chastanet assumes you'll want to explore. He's setting up signing privileges at restaurants all over town. (Our favorite: Spinnakers. It's informal, thatch-roofed, and right on nearby Reduit Beach, facing the sunset. Try the tuna stew.) If you're here in the summer, you can enroll your kids in the Coco's Montessori program. They'll hang out with St. Lucians their own age and take trips around the island.

Chastanet, 45, comes from an old St. Lucian family. (His father, Michael, a shipping and real estate magnate, is routinely referred to as "the prime minister.") Chastanet was educated abroad, worked for USAID in Washington, served as St. Lucia's director of tourism, and was VP of marketing for Air Jamaica before going into the hotel business. He has been around, in other words, and has acquired certain travel peeves, which he is trying to address at the Coco Palm.

For example, he dislikes waiting in line to register after a long day on airplanes. That's why there is no front desk at the Coco Palm. Instead Anna, our floor hostess--each floor has one--greets us on arrival and takes us straight to our rooms. (I give her my credit card later.) "Once you put someone behind a desk, you create a power relationship that doesn't favor the guest," Chastanet says. "And the front desk has two functions, service and administrative. Since administrative is most easily measured, service suffers."

Our two rooms are adjacent but not connecting--Chastanet says it's impossible to make connecting rooms adequately soundproof. Ours has a king and the kids' has two queens, a family-friendly alternating scheme that Chastanet has preserved throughout the hotel. Two-room suites are an option; each comes with iPod speakers and flat-screen TVs.

Hoping to thrill the girls, we have sprung for two of the Coco's very cool swim-up rooms, with steps that lead directly from a private patio into the pool. (Please see box for rates and other information.) Another clever design element in the pool: the wide shallow shelf at one end where parents can bathe with small children and still talk to adults; no more kiddie-pool ghetto.

Anna and the rest of the staff are warm, knowledgeable, and attentive, but because the Coco Palm is new (we visited just weeks after it opened), the staff is still working out a few kinks. It will be better when guests reliably get enough soap and towels to last the whole day and don't have to pay extra for beach chairs--Chastanet says he's on the case.

On day one we head for the beach, a five-minute walk if you know the way (ask Anna). Reduit Beach is a tad narrow and lined with low-rise hotels, and I'm told it gets crowded in season, but that's quibbling--it's gorgeous. The surf on this side of St. Lucia, facing the Caribbean, is calm.

Quickly I learn a valuable lesson, too late to do me any good, but maybe I can spare you: Don't buy jewelry on the first day. "If your father were going to buy you a necklace, which one would you like?" a vendor named Julius asks my daughter Annie. Before I know it, I've outfitted the family in costume beads and polished lava and spent 280 East Caribbean dollars, about $104. But Julius is charming and full of information, and does lead us in a roundabout way to Malakai, so no regrets.

I meet Malakai on my way up the beach to the ATM to get money for Julius. He is bearded and dreadlocked and nearly naked, squatting on his haunches, drawing Stars of David and Rasta hieroglyphics in the sand. We fall into a conversation, and Malakai offers to take me and my family on an all-day excursion in his boat to show us the real St. Lucia ("all natural, no plastic"), cold drinks included, for $440. "EC?" I ask. "U.S.," he says. Wiser now, I tell him that's too much. We agree on $360, half in advance.

At 9:30 the next day, there's Malakai as promised, knee-deep in the surf, gripping the gunwale of a long, pink, wooden canoe with an outboard motor. We head south down the Caribbean coast, hugging the shoreline, past steep green hills that drop straight into the sea, by Castries, the capital city and home of Nobel Prize-winning poet Derek Walcott, to the dock at Canaries, a tiny fishing village not on any tourist itinerary.

Later Malakai takes us to the Pitons, a pair of cone-shaped mountains that rise half a mile above the sea. At Soufrière, we transfer to a taxi for a steep, winding, ten-minute trip to what is reputed to be the world's only drive-in volcano (last major eruption: 1766), where we indulge in a therapeutic mud bath near a warm thermal spring. On the way back we stop to snorkel in the clear bay between the Pitons, lingering so long that we have to hurry to make it back to Reduit Beach before dark.

Tomorrow we'll go horseback riding on the beach (Trims Stables; two hours, $60), even into the ocean, even over the horses' heads. (They paddle like dogs: Who knew?) Later that night my wife and I will get pleasantly buzzed on Pitons beer while the girls sip virgin coladas. But this is the moment I'll always remember: racing home against the setting sun in the wide-open sea, sitting close to my wife on the middle bench of Malakai's boat, gazing at the backs of our windblown, brown-haired girls.

It's the kind of authentic experience you seldom get at all-inclusive resorts such as Sandals. When you interact with locals, you might overpay for jewelry, but you also open yourself up to the possibility of a magical day like the one we had with Malakai. That's how Chastanet himself likes to travel--no limbo contests or all-you-can-eat honeymoon buffets, please. I'm with him.