TAMPA BAY, FLA. • After more than a dozen vacations in Florida over the years, we thought we'd seen everything the Sunshine State had to offer. Then friends suggested we join them on the "wild side": primitive barrier islands off Tampa Bay and other islands within the bay that can be reached only by kayak or canoe.

My husband, Guy, and I have had some unusual experiences in canoes due to our inexpertise (he once got run over by another canoe). This trip would involve three days of solid paddling. Despite our trepidation, it sounded like fun.

We rented a tandem kayak and spent our first evening at Bill Jackson's Shop for Adventure in Pinellas Park, taking a class to learn the basics. In the morning, we set out along Weedon Island State Preserve's South Canoe Trail, the first of five designated water trails we would traverse. Who knew that it was twice, not half, as hard to paddle a tandem kayak as a single-seater?

Weedon is a 3,200-acre wildlife preserve actually made up of many tiny islands in the bay. The islands have few roads, fewer tourists and no high-rises. The preserve's South Trail is not far as the flamingo flies from the theme parks and other familiar Sunshine State tourist haunts, but it is seemingly remote, a world apart.

"This is where sea turtles, dolphins and manatees come to breed," said our guide, Grant Craig, a naturalist at Weedon.

We paddled toward a gaping maw of a canal, one of the "mosquito ditches" cut 50 years ago by the Army Corps of Engineers during an epidemic of mosquito-borne encephalitis. The corps believed that fish would swim into the ditches and eat the mosquito larvae hatching among the mangrove roots.

"The project was not a success," said Phyllis Kolianos, manager of a 6,000-square-foot education center on Weedon Island. "The only really effective way to control mosquitoes is with flyover sprays."

But the ditches remained, kept from filling in by the movement of the gulf tides. With a little grooming, she said, they've been turned into excellent kayak or canoe trails.

"We may not have a lot to thank mosquitoes for," she said. "But they are responsible for the kayak trails you'll be traveling.

"They open up a little-known, wonderful world, although as yet it's a side of Florida not too many people have seen or even know about."

The ditch seemed more like an oddly ragged tunnel, a surreal corridor covered by arched mangrove branches tightly woven just over our heads. Sunlight — filtered through the leafy branches where hundreds of thumbnail-size mangrove crabs were crawling — was a dim, eerie green.

Chocolate-colored water, redolent of fish and the sea, sloshed through the mangrove roots and against our tandem kayak, which, propelled by a couple of rookies, nosed every which way but straight, seemingly determined to lodge itself among the sturdy roots.

A few times, we accidentally rammed the kayak ahead of us. And sometimes the one coming along behind plowed into ours. But, amazingly, among our group of eight people, only one man capsized on the 4-mile trek — which also took us through open water and over wavy beds of sea grass — and he was the one who had tried this tricky business before.

As we paddled, Craig pointed out some of the flora we were passing, mostly mangroves with an occasional palmetto shoehorned in. Red mangroves, the most abundant, can distill fresh water from brackish water or saltwater and have roots like rigid octopus tentacles; black mangroves have snorkel-like roots; and white mangroves have odd little glands on each leaf blade for removing salt from the plant.

A wide array of fauna live in the mangrove swamps and seagrass beds. We saw dozens of kinds of fish, including the sleek brown mullet that vault out of the water like misguided torpedoes, plus crabs, shrimp, oysters, stingrays, even small sharks. Birds are mostly wading species and include the rare wood stork and magnificent roseate spoonbill. Bald eagles and ospreys decorate the treetops.

Weedon Island features a 6,000-foot-long boardwalk, which offers fine views of the swamps, mosquito ditch and bay.

Our next three kayak excursions were at Fort De Soto County Park on Mullet Key at the far southern end of Tampa Bay; Caladesi Island State Park on a barrier island off Clearwater; and Fred Howard Park near Tarpon Springs.

On Mullet Key, we paddled a 2 1/4-mile self-guided trail past 18 'stations." Visitors may see the nonvenomous mangrove salt marsh snake; a Florida horse conch, the state shell; or even a lumpy manatee. But mostly this is just a beautiful glide among mangrove trees.

Fort De Soto, begun in 1898 to defend Tampa Bay during the Spanish-American War and abandoned 23 years later, is nearby and can be toured. The park itself — 4,136 acres, 3,000 of them underwater — also offers two piers for fishing; bird watching, with nearly 300 species to view; seven miles of hiking and biking trails; and seven miles of one of the finest beaches in the country, says geologist Stephen Leatherman, AKA Dr. Beach.

Caladesi Island, one of Florida's few remaining undeveloped barrier islands, is reached by ferryboat from Honeymoon Island State Park across St. Joseph Sound. Caladesi, a state park since 1968, also claims one of the world's top 10 beaches. Its 3 1/4-mile kayak trail winds through mangrove forests rife with exotic birds: ibis, roseate spoonbills with fuchsia-hued plumage, beautiful yellow-crested night herons, showy white egrets, wood storks and ospreys. Game fish spawn here, and dolphins and manatees can sometimes be seen. (No manatees were in evidence, but we spotted bunches of frisky dolphins.)

At Fred Howard Park, 155 acres at the northern end of Pinellas County, the kayak trail runs through a mangrove wilderness where bald eagles nest and dolphins noisily chase down schools of mullet. Here, we paddled into the middle of placid Lake Avoca and rested our oars for a few minutes to watch the late afternoon sky turn the water to bright silver streaked with gold.

For our last and coolest kayak outing, we joined one of Bill Jackson's evening "adventures" from Memorial Park across from St. Petersburg to Hot Dog Island in the inter-coastal waterway. Getting there required a difficult 45-minute paddle in rough water, but cups of spicy sangria were waiting and, appropriately, hot dogs were roasting over a wood fire.

As the sun disappeared, leaving a fiery orange stain along the western horizon, the full moon, luminous as a pearl, popped up in the east. Mosquitoes emerged from the mangroves and broke up our party, but not before we were all stuffed and pleasantly mellow.

The trip back was magical. We fastened neon-yellow glow sticks to the bows of our kayaks, which, strung out and otherwise invisible on the black water, could have been a long chain of lit paper lanterns.

By now Guy and I had somewhat mastered the ins and outs of kayaking (Rule No. 1: The bigger butt — his — sits in the back). And this time the tide was with us.

With an admiring moon watching, we practically flew across the water.