My guide, a friendly and knowledgeable young man named Angelo Gustillo, ferries me across the bay to a small lagoon, known locally as "the small lagoon, " which you get to by kayaking through a narrow fissure in a limestone breaker.

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The white sand beach faces a small, lagoon-style bay that's great for swimming.

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The problem is that on the Carteret Islands, a horseshoe shaped scatter of small islands around a central lagoon, nowhere is more than 1.2 meters above sea level.

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