Children's book 1980s?

[chaos_monkey]

Hi folks!
Please help... I'm beginning to think I imagined this!

I read this book in about 1988 (I was 8 or 9), but it wasn't a new book as I remember.
It was about a child (I think it was a boy, but the only other person who remembers this book existing remembers a girl, so it could be either). This child lives at a science research station where they've found a way to talk to dolphins. There are 2 (I think) captive dolphins that the child talks to and befriends.
There's some kind of storm and the research base is destroyed. The child swims away with one of the dolphins. Time passes, and adventures happen...

At the end...

The child reaches Australia, and is trying to get to the beach. The locals on the beach eventually realise that the kid wants to get to shore, and advise him (?) on which waves to use. The kid gets to shore with this advice and lives happily ever after ( I assume).

Can anyone help??

 

[kelsue]

Is it maybe Dolphin Island: A Story of the People of the Sea by Arthur C Clarke?

Late one night (in the world of the future), a giant cargo hovership makes an emergency landing somewhere in the middle of the United States, and an enterprising citizen named Johnny Clinton stows away on it. In the space of only a few hours the craft crashes into the Pacific Ocean. The sole survivor is Johnny, whose life is saved by the "People of the Sea"--dolphins. A school of these fantastic creatures guides him to an island on Australia's Great Barrier Reef. There Johnny becomes involved with the work of a strange and fascinating research laboratory, learns skindiving and survives a typhoon--only to risk his life again, immediately afterwards, in a cliff-hanger of a climax.