SOS in sand helps save three men marooned in Pacific

Here’s a useful tip: If you ever find yourself stuck on an uninhabited island in the Pacific, it turns out that writing SOS in giant letters on the sand works.

At least, it did this past weekend for three men whose small boat had run out of fuel and drifted off course among the hundreds of islands and atolls of Micronesia.

The men, said to be mariners from the Micronesian island of Pulap, were reported missing Friday after setting off for home from the Puluwat atoll, about 25 miles away, a day earlier. In a joint operation, aircraft dispatched by U.S. authorities in Guam and a ship sent by the Australian military combed the area in a search for the sailors, the U.S. Coast Guard said.

On Sunday afternoon, one of the U.S. aircraft was finishing the final leg of the day’s patrol when crew members saw the scrawled letters and a blue-and-white vessel on the sand of a tiny uninhabited atoll called Pikelot. Lt. Col. Jason Palmeira-Yen, the pilot of the aircraft, said he was reaching the end of the planned search grid when he turned the plane to avoid a rain shower.

“That’s when we looked down and saw an island, so we decide to check it out and that’s when we saw SOS and a boat right next to it on the beach,” he said.

An Australian reconnaissance helicopter later delivered food and water to the marooned men, before a Micronesian vessel picked them up Monday and took them back home to Pulap.

Authorities said that the men’s 23-footlong boat had drifted off course after it ran out of fuel, and they eventually reached Pikelot, about 118 miles west of their departure point on Puluwat.

Writing huge letters in the sand has proved helpful to travelers stranded in the Pacific in the past. In 2016, three men whose boat was overturned in Micronesian waters swam 2 miles to reach a tiny island, from which they were rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard after writing “HELP” in the sand.

“This isn’t the set of Castaway …” the U.S. Coast Guard Hawaii Pacific wrote at the time, a reference to the movie in which Tom Hanks plays a man stranded on an uninhabited island after a plane crash.

Later that year, two other people who had been missing for a week were rescued from a Micronesian island after they wrote SOS in the sand.

AUSTRALIAN DEFENCE FORCE An Australian Army helicopter lands Sunday on the tiny island of Pikolet, Micronesia, where three stranded sailors were found.