3 rescued from island after writing ‘HELP’ with palm leaves

Three men stranded on a remote Pacific island for more than a week were rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard after spelling out “HELP” on a beach using palm leaves.

The lost men were found on Pikelot, an uninhabited island about 100 miles northwest of their home, alongside their damaged boat Sunday by a U.S. military aircraft, the Coast Guard Sector Guam said in a statement.

The men, experienced mariners in their 40s, set sail March 31 from Polowat Atoll, an island that is part of the Federated States of Micronesia, in a 20-foot open skiff powered by an outboard motor. After their unintended delay, the Coast Guard said, the men had been safely returned home Tuesday evening.

The search began Saturday when a woman sent out a distress call to the Coast Guard, reporting that her three uncles had not returned home after almost a week away. The

Coast Guard embarked on the search with a U.S. Navy aircraft crew.

Pikelot is a tiny dot in the Pacific Ocean covered in palm trees and bushes, measuring less than 2,000 feet long. The Micronesian island was part of a search area that the Coast Guard said spanned more than 100,000 square miles.

Sunday’s rescue was not the first from Pikelot involving huge letters spelled in the sand. In 2020, three other men whose boat ran out of fuel wrote “SOS” in the sand, allowing them to be spotted by American rescuers.

In the latest search, a breakthrough came when a Navy reconnaissance aircraft that was dispatched from Okinawa, Japan, spotted the men from the air.

“In a remarkable testament to their will to be found, the mariners spelled out ‘HELP’ on the beach using palm leaves, a crucial factor in their discovery,” Lt. Chelsea Garcia, who coordinated Sunday’s search-and-rescue mission, said in the statement.

The aircraft crew deployed survival packages to help the men before the Coast Guard dropped them a radio a day later from a military aircraft sent from Hawaii, establishing a line of communication.