Tourists find grenade in waters off Anna Maria Island

ANNA MARIA — Georgia tourists Mitchell Lee, 37, and Jason Waldron, 36, have been best friends since childhood, and Waldron is always doing something to make Lee laugh.

But Lee, a member of the Georgia Air National Guard who just returned from a tour of duty in Afghanistan, thought Waldron was joking when he yelled out during a vacation swim off Anna Maria Island on Monday, “Hey, I just found a grenade!”

“I said, ‘No you didn’t,’” Lee said.

“Yes, I did, wanna see?” Waldron repeated, showing Lee the unexploded grenade from World War II or the Vietnam era he had just unearthed from silt with his toes in about four feet of water near the Rod & Reel Pier.

“Yes, you did,” Lee said, astonished.

The Manatee County Sheriff’s Office bomb squad later collected the grenade, which was highly corroded from years being buried under water. The bomb squad destroyed it Tuesday during an operation at an undisclosed farm off State Road 64, said Lt. Gary Sammons, commander of the bomb squad.

“I couldn’t believe that I came all the way from Afghanistan only to be handed a grenade on vacation,” Lee said, laughing and shaking his head.

Waldron, a telephone technician with Cox Telephone in Waycross, Ga., was pulling up clams, sand dollars and shells with his toes while Lee and four other family members were floating about 500 yards from the Rod & Reel Pier.

The six, all from Georgia, came Saturday and are leaving Saturday, enjoying a week’s rental of a beach house on the bay side of Anna Maria Island near where the grenade was found.

“I’ve thrown grenades in the military, and I could tell the pin was still in this one, but the spoon was corroded off,” Lee said, referring to the pulling apparatus.

Deputies came out and put crime tape around the area for a short time and evacuated Waldron’s rental and one nearby until Sammons drove in by himself and put the grenade into a container.

“We set it on a beach towel on a lounge chair,” Lee said.

“It’s so corroded that it is unlikely that it could still explode, but we never know for sure,” Sammons said. “It’s a pineapple grenade from either World War II or Vietnam. The handle is corroded off. But the safety pin is still inside. The TNT inside is probably no longer in working order, but we instructed our deputies not to touch it until I got there.”

The grenade was destroyed using a “counter charge,” which is simply another explosive placed beside it and ignited, Sammons said.

“We will dig a small pit out on farm land,” Sammons said.

Anna Maria Island was the site of military training and ordnance testing during World War II, which could account for the grenade.

“From history, we know that the military used the tip of Anna Maria Island during the 1940s to train for beach landings and it was also used as a range for dropping big bombs,” Sammons said. “It’s hard to say how old the grenade is, but we can say it has been there many years.”

This story was originally published July 12, 2011 at 5:34 AM with the headline "Tourists find grenade in waters off Anna Maria Island."