16/17JAN14 - Fort Pierce, FL

Thursday morning, 16JAN, we hit the road for the Everglades National Park.  We decided to drive half way & spend two nights in the Fort Pierce area.  We stayed at a very nice RV resort but the campsite barely had ten feet of clearance between a pine tree & the concrete pad!  After setting up camp we headed to the nearest "dog" beach.  As we noted many years ago on visiting Daytona, FL; Florida has miles & miles of beaches, but often dogs are not allowed?  We noted several large sirens on the drive & assumed they were for tornado warnings, but soon figured out they were for the nearby St Lucie nuke plant.  On TV that evening the weather forecasters were on high alert because of another cold snap coming!  Over half the news hour was about cold weather; you'd thought a hurricane was coming.

Friday morning we headed out to our first stop of the day -the National Navy Seal Museum & Memorial.  Why Fort Pierce, FL, for this museum; & not Coronado, CA, where all SEALs are now trained?  Because Fort Pierce was the original training facility for Underwater Demolition Teams (UDTs) during WWII - & the UDTs are considered the beginning of the modern SEAL teams created in 1962.  Back during WWII Fort Pierce was "remote" & sparsely populated, & the good weather & beach provided an excellent training area.

Turns out the Seabees had a training facility just up the beach.  So the Seabees would build beach structures & the UDT trainees would blow them up.  After the war the Seabees & the UDTs packed-up & left the area, not brothering to remove the remaining beach structures/obstacles.  In 1991 the remaining structures were removed & many of them are now in the museum.  An excellent museum that even has the actual lifeboat that Captain Phillips was rescued from while being held Somali pirates!

http://www.navysealmuseum.org/

 

Lunch was at Archie's Seabreeze, Dan classifies it as a Pirate/Biker Bar.  Archie's has excellent food & a friendly wait staff who obviously have lived in local area long time, if not natives.  Archie's started in 1947 as "military shack" serving beer to the military stationed in the area.  Dan went with clam chowder & a fried conch sandwich, Corrie went with the steamers.

 

http://www.archiesseabreeze.com/

Last stop of the day was the US Life Saving Service's "Gilbert's Bar House of Refuge", a museum run by the Elliott Museum of Hutchinson Island, FL.  When Dan discovered the museum on the internet he wondered was this some eccentric museum dedicated to a bar & a house of ill repute?  Turns out the Gilbert's Bar is shallow inlet named after the pirate Gilbert, used by him to allude the authorities.  And the Houses of Refuge (ten total) were created by the Life Saving Service & were unique to the east coast of Florida.

Although there were many ship wrecks off the coast Florida every year, there were very few Life Saving Stations in Florida in the 1870s.  Turns out most survivors often made it safely ashore because of Florida's sandy beaches; as opposed to reefs, rocks or cliffs elsewhere.  However, it often took survivors many weeks to hike to safety (if they made it).  Because of this the Houses of Refuge were created, along with simple sign posts on the beach pointing & giving distance to the nearest House.  Each House had a Keeper (& usually his family), whose duty it was to provide food, water, & a place to sleep.  The survivors would stay at the House until the Keeper could signal a passing ship to take the survivors to the nearest port.

Although not a Life Saving Station, each Keeper was expected to do their best to rescue any survivors in the water.  Often there were heroic rescues in small flat bottom boats the Keepers had built themselves, since a boat was not part of the government issued equipment.  This museum is the last remaining House of Refuge & we are very glad that we stumbled across it!

http://www.houseofrefugefl.org/