‘HELP’ sign points rescuers to men on remote atoll
Three men stranded on an uninhabited Pacific island survived for more than a week and used palm fronds to spell out HELP on the beach — leading to rescue by Navy and Coast Guard aviators who spotted the sign from several thousand feet in the air.
They had embarked March 31 in a 20-foot boat with an outboard motor from Pulawat Atoll, a small island with about an estimated 1,000 inhabitants in the Federated States of Micronesia about 1,800 miles east of the Philippines.
The men were fishing when they hit a coral reef, putting a hole in the boat’s bottom and causing it to take on water, Lt. Keith Arnold said in a Coast Guard video.
A Coast Guard ship picked up the men Tuesday and took them back to the atoll where they had set out nine days earlier and 100 miles away.
They were “obviously very excited” to be reunited with their families, Coast Guard L. Cmdr. Christine Igisomar, a coordinator of the search and rescue mission, said in a Coast Guard video.
When their boat was damaged, “they knew they weren’t going to be able to make their return home and would need to beach their vessel,” said Arnold.
On April 6, a relative reported them missing to a Coast Guard facility in Guam, saying the men in their 40s had not returned from Pikelot Atoll. A search initially covering 78,000 square miles began.
The crew of a U.S. Navy plane from Japan spotted the three on Pikelot and dropped survival packages. The next day, a Coast Guard plane dropped a radio the men used to report they were thirsty but all right, Arnold said.