Three men stranded on a desert island in the Pacific Ocean survived for more than a week and used palm fronds to spell HELP on the beach – leading to rescue by Navy and Coast Guard pilots who spotted the sign from several thousand feet in saw the sky.
They had embarked on March 31 in a 20-foot boat with an outboard motor from Pulawat Atoll, a small island with an estimated population of 1,000 in the Federated States of Micronesia, about 2,000 miles east of the Philippines.
The men were fishing when they struck a coral reef, punching a hole in the bottom of the boat and causing it to take on water, Lt. Keith Arnold said in a Coast Guard video.
A Coast Guard ship, the Oliver Henry, picked up the men on Tuesday and returned them to the atoll where they had left nine days earlier and 100 miles away, the statement said.
They were “obviously very excited” to be reunited with their families, Coast Guard L. Cmdr. Christine Igisomar, a search and rescue mission coordinator, said in a Coast Guard video.
When their boat was damaged, “they knew they would not be able to return home and would have to beach their ship,” Arnold said.
On April 6, a family member reported them missing at a Coast Guard facility in Guam, saying the men in their 40s had not returned from Pikelot Atoll. A search began that initially covered 200,000 square kilometers.
The crew of a U.S. Navy P-8 Poseidon aircraft from Kadena Air Base in Japan spotted the three on Pikelot and dropped survival kits. The next day, a Coast Guard HC-130J Hercules aircraft from Barbers Point Air Base in Hawaii radioed the men reporting they were thirsty, but all was well, Arnold said.
“The relief sign was quite visible. We could see it from a few thousand feet in the air,” Arnold said.
A similar rescue of three men from Pulawat Atoll took place on Pikelot Atoll in 2020. Those men spelled “SOS” on the beach.
An Australian military helicopter crew landed and gave them food and water before a Micronesian patrol vessel could pick them up.