Few things are more unsettling to those swimming or splashing in the sea than the sight of nearby fins. They're usually startling, even if they turn out to be attached to the backs of friendly porpoises. Fortunately, those were the kinds of fins the Kirbys saw bobbing through the waves just off St. Simons' Island on the Georgia coast during our end-of-summer vacation earlier this month.

Well, most of the fins we saw belonged to porpoises, I should say.

St. Simons is a family-oriented beach town where the churches are big and well-attended and seem to outnumber the bars. It's a far cry from the likes of Myrtle Beach and Ocean City, Md., the boisterous beach town I often visited in my coming-of-age years. It's a low-key beach I might have found boring back then, but not now.

We stayed on the northern end of the island near the old Coast Guard Station, which was just 30 feet from the water's edge when built by the Works Progress Administration in 1937 but which, due to the shifting shoreline, now is so far from the beach that a replacement station was built on the other end of the island 15 years ago.

The old station now hosts a kid-friendly museum that highlights the island's ecology and, in the process, explains why there are so few shells on the St. Simons' beach (the presence of a long sand bar just offshore, which saps much of the energy from the waves). It also highights the role of the Coast Guard and the island's World War II days, when a pair of freighters were torpedoed with heavy loss of life within sight of the shore by a German U-Boat (submarine).

Rolling back the hands of history a couple of centuries, we also toured the ruins of Fort Frederica, established by Georgia founder Gen. James Oglethorpe in 1736 as a buffer against Spanish-occupied Florida. Unfortunately, our tour coincided with a day when the mercury was well into the 90s. And I'll tell you this: It would have taken a lot more than the threat of invasion to persuade me to go hack a new life out of the sub-tropical jungle back in the days before air conditioning and window screens.

Our vacation also included a jaunt over to Jekyll Island and its historic district, including a tour of the Georgia Sea Turtle Center, the state's first facility for the care of sick and injured sea turtles.

But in case you're wondering, yes, we did more than go to museums, and we did make it out onto the beach every day. The water was warm. We loved it, and so did the dolphins, who swam past almost within splashing distance, feeding on whatever it is they feed on. Cynical journalist that I am, I muttered to my wife, Fran, that if the dolphins could swim that close to shore, so could the sharks.

Evidence of that came a couple evenings later when we were out on the pier that juts into the sound off downtown St. Simons, and which is usually lined with fishermen. The star attraction that night, as it were, was a shirtless, heavily tattooed, always-moving angler named Billy with several days' stubble of beard who was simultaneously working multiple lines at different parts of the pier, and who had a little crowd of onlookers in tow as well.

He was visiting from Florida and had been fishing continuously for four days, even sleeping on the pier, he told me.

The smaller fish he caught he quickly recycled - into bait - with which he was catching bigger fish, like sting rays and yes, sharks. He reeled in a two-foot-long hammerhead shark as we watched.

After removing the hook and posing for a few pictures with the bloodied-and-still-snapping shark, he tossed the sinister fish back into the ocean and headed to check his other rods. It was quite a show. Entertaining, yes; and almost startling enough to prompt this columnist - and especially his kids Lucy (13) and Miles (8) - to forgo any thoughts about wading into water deeper than their waists for the rest of our trip.

Oh, and did I mention that it was "Shark Week" on one of the cable TV channels that week, featuring hours and hours of footage of sharks and the damage they have wrought through the years?

We almost decided it was foolish to serve ourselves up as tasty morsels for the denizens of the deep, or in our case, the sharks in the shallows. Better to eat seafood, in other words, than be eaten by it.

But we settled on the best of both worlds. We gorged on seafood, and waded back into the ocean blue. And lived to tell about it.

We can't wait to go back - fins or no fins.

Joe Kirby is Editorial Page Editor of the Marietta Daily Journal and author of "The Bell Bomber Plant."