I see you smiling there on the beach, friend, sitting under your SPF-1000 parasol, contemptuously sipping an iced coffee, mystery novel in hand. It's a mystery out there, the sea, isn't it? Where the dolphins swim? Oh, yes, there are toy dolphins here on the beach, but they are dolphins for the mind of a child: one prick of the pin and their bodies burst onto the water. Believe me, it'd take a German harpoon to do the same to a real dolphin. (The children will cry in either case.)

Will you pay for a tour, then? Well, I've got a boat, and a captain, too. He's a foreigner, yes, so he's very excited about this trip (they always are!). The boat's rather buoyant, too. Come on, then! I'm told she belonged to President Roosevelt, so you see she's quite easy to board!

Take a seat as we embark and I'll begin the tour as I always do, with the libretto from a self-penned sea-shanty: It was I, two German spies, and a Brazilian revolutionary hiding Vichy France's diamonds in mess-stock oyster shells, siphoning these through the hull of a Richelieu battleship and into the nighttime sea, where a third German waited with net on his own craft. Nearly two hours into it, the radio squawks that no jewels have yet reached our fifth man, he suspecting "Das Geistschiff".

We other four suspect bullshit, so I'm up and lowered into a lifeboat, where I find the other end of our makeshift pipeline to be in fact the oyster-gobbling snout of a dolphin, who'd been enjoying for himself the hors d'oeuvres of what we'd hoped to become a magnificent fete. Radio communiqué with my hull-bound accomplices suggests that the chance has slipped and so we presently divide the dolphin, and loot, separately among us four; but the Brazilian insists that we sail the now jewel-encrusted dolphin into the Yucatan peninsula and bequeath it onto whatever believable heir to the Mayan throne we might find (whose ancestors were privy to such things).

"Seeze the basterrd!" then echoes from within the ship, and I assume this their final order, but further gunshots and nasal consonants makes it clear that the French have found the lot out. After calming the dolphin a bit with oysters from my pocket, I tie a rope around the creature's midsection -- foreswearing the conspicuous lifeboat -- and we two sail together into the Gulf of Mexico, and bid each other heartfelt adieu, my pockets, and the dolphin, still stuffed with diamonds, but the virgin Florida coast accommodating to both. How I wish I would have kept the dolphin's diamonds!

But it was the dolphin who saved my life, and allowed for my comfortable retirement. Would you like to learn more? On this half-started tour, as we stare into the ocean from mid-deck, we might also make it our aim to teach you (it will not cost you extra) the methods of befriending one of the sea's most genteel animals, the trustworthy and dependable dolphin, who may one day provide for you as one did me. Agreed? You won't regret it!