IT HAD SEEMED like a good idea, on a full stomach: a true test of survival, a concept that has captivated our collective psyche from the Israelites' passage through the desert all the way up to the 14th season of Survivor. Most everyone has wondered how they would do in such circumstances. I intended to find out by dropping myself on a desert island.

The key was finding the perfect place. The island needed to be uninhabited, but close to help. It had to have fresh water, a food source, and a tropical climate, because I didn't fancy reliving the Shackleton expedition. After two weeks of searching, my focus narrowed to Islas Secas, a 16-island archipelago 12 miles off Panama's Pacific coast.

The Islas Secas resort sits on the only inhabited part of the chain, and Michael Klein, the hotel's owner, told me about its desert neighbor, Isla Pargo, two miles away: a 480-acre island with fresh water, coconuts, and an abundance of sea life. There are no mammals, but plenty of birds and iguanas, if, he added, I could catch them. Help was about ten minutes away by speedboat, and there was even an airstrip near the resort in case of an emergency.

Since the idea was to survive, not to die, there were some ground rules. First, I wanted to bring along as little as possible. At the suggestion of every survival expert I spoke with, I brought a knife, in this case a foot-long Ka-Bar Heavy Bowie. For entertainment purposes I brought a dive mask, with the added bonus that it might help me catch dinner. A basic first aid kit was necessary to clean wounds. Media equipment—notebooks, pens, cameras (both still and video), and a Brunton solar panel to power them—was needed to record this story. In case of an emergency, my Big Red Button was an Iridium satellite phone. Every three days I'd call my editor, Mary Turner, when I knew she wouldn't be in the office, and leave a "still alive" voice mail. If she didn't hear from me, she'd call the Islas Secas resort and the staff would search for my body. As a backup I had an ACR personal locator beacon to alert the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration about my location. But what I really needed was survival skills.

I am not a survival expert. The last time I killed anything was with my truck. When asked to assess my skills, Bob Berman, my mother's steady of 12 years, suggested that I'd do "better at local bars than alone on an island." I grew up in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, a city kid to the sneakers. As a healthy, adventurous 28-year-old I spend a lot of time outdoors, mostly in the water—surfing, kayaking, kiteboarding—and I'm a Scuba dive master. But these are finite activities bookended by coffee in the morning and a frosty Boddingtons at night.

"It's tough," warned Les Stroud, creator and star of the Science Channel's Survivorman, when I asked for advice. Stroud has been practicing survival skills for 20 years, and still calls a week in the wild a long haul. "It's really easy to say, 'I'm going to be able to get some fish, I'm going to get some iguanas,'" he told me. "Then you go put it into practice and it's a whole other ball game."

Fortunately, I had signed up for a crash survival course with Stroud's former teacher, John "Prairie Wolf" McPherson. Prairie Wolf and his wife, Geri, authors of the Naked into the Wilderness books, teach survival skills to, among others, Green Berets. They live off the grid in a three-story log cabin they built themselves, in eastern Kansas. Prairie Wolf, 62, earned a Purple Heart in Vietnam and makes Rambo look soft. Geri, a 64-year-old great-grandmother, specializes in tanning animal skins in their own brain juice.

Green Berets typically spend two weeks mastering skills with Prairie Wolf and Geri, but I had to cram everything into five days. They showed me how to make traps, fire, shelter, and rope, but first they had to teach me how to whittle. None of the materials we used would be available in Panama, Prairie Wolf explained, but the tropics, with all its biodiversity, should have plenty of good wood.

On the first afternoon, while Prairie Wolf ran errands and Geri skinned a deer, I made a fire with a bow drill. I used materials Prairie Wolf had made from softwood (ideal for fire making), with tinder he had helped me collect, but that hardly mattered. When he returned to find me standing victoriously in front of my roaring inferno, I told him to call me the Human Torch.

"Good job," he said. "But don't get too cocky. Fire is always most difficult when it's most important."

It took me two more days to spark another flame. Geri urged me not to get discouraged and explained that it had taken her months to make fire routinely. I didn't have that luxury. I made fire a few more times before leaving, but I couldn't shake the feeling that spending five days in Kansas a month before my departure was a lot like cracking a few law books the night before the bar exam. When I left, Prairie Wolf wished me luck. I could tell he meant it.