Photo: Pelicans mass on the extreme northern tip of Wassaw Island.

There is something intriguing about an uninhabited island.

It inspires fantasies of kissing that soul-grinding daily commute goodbye and escaping the madness of modern-day life. Of packing up those desert island music picks and all the books you’ve meant to read, being deposited on a little patch of paradise in the middle of the sea and channeling your inner Robinson Crusoe.

Those were the thoughts running through my head one day in April as Fran Lapolla of Savannah Coastal Ecotours piloted our Carolina skiff toward Wassaw, an uninhabited island off the coast of Georgia.

Wassaw is among the youngest of Georgia’s barrier islands, formed just 1,600 years ago. One of the few islands to never have been clear-cut for timber or farming, it is home to old-growth maritime forests of cedar, oak, pine, cabbage palm, magnolia and holly. But the uplands only constitute a small portion of Wassaw. Seventy-five percent of the 10,000-acre island is salt marsh.

It’s not unusual for islands to shift in size and shape over time due to ocean currents and weather patterns, but Wassaw’s shape-shifting has been more dramatic than others. As its northern shore erodes, leaving behind a boneyard of sun-bleached tree trunks, its southern shore has steadily accreted, resulting in a counterclockwise shifting of the island’s place in the world.

Photo: The remains of Fort Morgan, constructed during the Spanish-American War, are exposed during low tide on Wassaw Island.

The only way to get to Wassaw Island is by private or chartered boat. Plenty of people anchor offshore and spend the day on its 7 miles of wilderness beach, but they have to leave by sundown. Docking at Wassaw requires a special-use permit, and it’s reserved for people like Lapolla, who operate tours on the island.

On the day we arrive, it is unusually hot for early spring, so we limit our visit to a short hike through the wooded uplands from the dock on Wassaw Creek to a wide, white-sand beach littered with cannonball jellyfish and sand dollars. There isn’t another soul in sight. Had we been more ambitious, we might have traveled farther northeast to the ruins of tiny Fort Morgan, built during the Spanish-American War of 1898, but not on this day.

Photo: A Black Skimmer skims the surface of Beach Pond on the northern end of Wassaw Island.

In truth, Wassaw is inhabited from mid-May to Labor Day by the two-person staff and six volunteers who run the Caretta Research Project, the country’s longest continuously operating sea turtle saturation tagging program. During nesting season, staff and volunteers patrol all night long, tagging and collecting data on the females that lay their eggs here. This year has been a record-breaker — 101 nests accounted for as of June 10.

The public can participate in the tagging program for a $795 fee, which covers the cost of a week’s worth of meals and shared accommodations in one of the Parsons cabins.

In addition, the FWS runs controlled deer hunts on the island, so sportsmen sometimes stay overnight in primitive campsites during hunting season.

But for the rest of the time, Wassaw truly is a deserted island.