ONE LAZY AFTERNOON, toodling through the magazine rack of my neighborhood bookstore, I stumble upon an intriguing postage-stamp-size classified ad in the back of a yachting rag shelved close to the floor. It reads, "Chocolate delivery vessel, crew needed." A Web site elaborates: "Prana, the chocolate ship, is a 36-foot wooden ketch that sails chocolate that I make in Grenada to other Grenadine Islands and farther Caribbean islands, too."

The Grenada Chocolate Company, it turns out, is a tiny producer of two kinds of choco-late bar (71 percent and 60 percent cocoa) on the lush, 12-by-21-mile island at the bottom of the Caribbean. It retails primarily in Grenada, New York, San Francisco, and London. The dreamer who placed the ad and founded the co-op, 42-year-old U.S. expat Mott Green, occasionally sails chocolate himself because, apparently, it's easier to air-freight bars around the world than it is to find reliable, temperature-controlled shipping to islands just 15 miles away.

Hoo-ha! In my catalog of life's happy accidents, today's bit of luck will surely rank high, I predict.

I fantasize about a sweet escape, puttering around dockside markets, doing lazy business, and sponsoring the grandpas playing poker under gumbo trees. I'll snorkel every morning but never sunburn, and soon share a chocolate bar, Lady and the Tramp style, with a woman who is a cross between a swimsuit model and my kindergarten teacher.

Indeed, the dreams become so vivid and large that they overshadow a gradual, very Caribbean unfurling of reality. When I first e-mail Mott, he cryptically puts off my solicitations. A few months later comes a crushing blow. The "ketch project," he writes, has been "delegated" to a local named Hope. Pressed, Mott confesses he sold the rotting boat.

For those I've seduced with my fantasy, including Sam, a ponytailed 34-year-old buddy who lives on a boat in Key West, this is no reason to let the dream die. Together we hatch a new plan. We'll charter our own boat, convince Mott to sell us the chocolate wholesale, and keep the goods cool by ... well, we'll sort out that detail in Grenada.

Eleven days later, Sam and I rendezvous in the airport in Puerto Rico.

"It'll all work out, mon," he promises.

"Yeah," I sputter, fully aware that we still have no plan to keep the bars from morphing into hot chocolate. And there's another teensy problem: We'll be undocumented workers in Grenada, smugglers in neighboring St. Vincent.