Fort Pierce

Yesterday we got together with Tom and Cheryl, and decided up a great day trip over to the Atlantic Ocean, and visited Fort Pierce. Way back in the 1880's sometime, a U. S. General by the name of General Pierce set up a camp and turned it into a Fort, hence the name. While we did not visit the Fort, we did make a couple of other stops to make it a great day.

Our first visit was to the Fort Pierce Manatee Centre. This is located downtown, and close to the Ocean. Florida has about 5,000 Florida Manatees that live in the State, with a bunch of them here. They really like warm water, as they are a mamal, and a close relative to the elephant.

You have to pay $1.00 to enter the Research Centre which is full of all kinds of neat Ocean type stuff...

Check out the picture above...Judy is hold a horseshoe crab in her hands... her's is the hand in the centre. The Docent passed the crab to her, but it moves pretty quick.

The manatees swam right up to the Research Centre along this waterway, and as you can see, sail boats also come in.

They had a nice lion fish inside the centre as well... (taken with the iPone 5)

We found a great little Park down by the Ocean to enjoy our picnic lunch that we packed for the day. Our agenda was not done for the day, as right beside the Park was located The Navy Seal Museum. I had found this place on the internet and wanted to check it out. We had a blast.

The Seals have a long history in Fort Pierce having a base here for many years. They have an excellent Museum along with outside displays for an $8.00 entry fee.

Tom is showing his abilities on the outdoor Seal training course they have set up for all to enjoy!

A Seal attack boat...

Above is a piece of the North Tower from New York City that fell on Sept. 11th.

Above is a mock up of Osama Bin Laden's house, being invaded by the Navy Seal Team 6. Below is a close up of the room they found him in... these models were dontated to the Museum by CBS TV.

One of the Seals favourite tools is the Blackhawk seen above. This one saw a lot of action in different hot spots around the world and was shot down 3 times but survived each one!

You will recall the ship, Maersk Alabama, that had pirate problems back and while ago and a fellow by the name of Captain Philips required Seal assistance to get away! I think they made a big movie out of this...ya, I went to the movie. They have one of the lifeboats from the actual ship on display in the museum, very similiar to the one Captain Philips was in. Not a lot of room inside them.

They had some real Navy Seal guns you could play with...(no bullets...) so I was trying a few of them out... all I could do was lift it, really heavy!

This was a special built Hummer made for the Seals, loaded to bear!

Above was a high speed attack boat, that was special built... quite the machine to check out...

Above is a mock up of an Apollo Space Capsule that they used to practice recovery with out in the Ocean.

Above is the famous Huey, that was well used in Vietnam. The Seals liked it as it was very fast going in and out of the danger zone.

It was over 85 deg. F. so yes, we did make our way to the beach for a while... just beautiful along here. Waves were pretty big, fun to watch.

We even found a couple "man of wars" You don't want to get bitten by this thing...

Overall, just another great day in better weather!

Till tomorrow...

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