So the Knights Templar (Poor Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon) were a monastic military order established in the 12th century to protect European pilgrims to the Near East during the Crusades, and intimately associated with the fight against Muslims. By the early 14th century when the Templars were condemned and disbanded, Europe had pretty much lost the Crusades. There wasn't really a use for crusading Templars in the Near East anymore.

But Iberia was still fighting the final remnants of the Reconquista. Five years after the formal abolition of the Templars at the Council of Vienne (1312), the King of Portugal founded a military monastic order to replace the Templars and won papal approval for them in 1319. In 1323, moreover, he obtained the lucrative deal from the pope for the Portuguese Templar assets to be turned over to his new Order of the Knights of Christ rather than the Hospitallers. As to the navy? The Templars did have a small fleet, but I don't believe anyone knows what happened to it when the order was condemned.

The new order adopted the imagery, possessions, and (properly adjusted for the times) mission of the Templars. The extent to which it was a direct continuation of the Templars in terms of membership will probably never be answered. By way of their monastic Rule, that is, the regulations governing daily life and the running of the order, the Order of Christ actually used the Rule of a Spanish order, the Order of Calatrava, which had not been suppressed at the time of the Templar condemnation.

But. Even the Reconquista, the last remnants of Europe's crusading past, eventually came to an end. The Order of Christ floundered about...until a certain Prince Henry became head of the order. Henry the Navigator. You may have heard of him? He mobilized the order in his exploring mission. He used the Order's coffers to fund his explorations, and Portuguese ships traveling the world flew the order's flag, a slightly modified version of the Templars' (which may be what your friend is thinking of).

In fact, just as the Knights Templar had been military monks for abroad, service in Portuguese Africa in particular became a requirement for membership in the order (even as it lost its religious element to become simply a knightly order of noblemen). They even dubbed native Kongolese members and knights. The Kingdom of Kongo eventually established its own branch of the order, and its banner and other imagery--the same banner that had guided Europeans in the Near East so many centuries ago--became one of the most important symbols of the nobility of Kongo.

My source on this, of all things, is a fascinating book by African art historican Cecile Fromont, The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of Kongo. (I had wanted to know why I was seeing Templar iconography in pre-colonial Africa.)