"HELP" Sign Leads To Castaways

It was an ordinary day.  Checking out my morning newspaper when I came across a large sized heading to  a story in the "WORLD" section of the newspaper.  Headline read, "'HELP' sign leads to castaways."  The sub-head read..."Three men stuck 9 days on remote atoll create message with palm fronds."  Now this is the stuff you see in movies!  Seems that three men were stranded on an uninhabited Pacific island for more than a week and used palm fronds to spell out HELP on the small island's beach.  

That in turn led to the rescue by Navy and Coast Guard aviators who spotted the sign from several thousand feet in the air.  They had embarked on their journey on March 31 of this year 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.  Now this is stuff that was made for a full-length movie...so it is!  The men had embarked on a fishing voyage when they hit a coral ref, putting a hole in the boat's bottom and causing it to take on water.  A Coast Guard ship, the Oliver Henry, picked up the men and took them back to the atoll where they had set out days earlier and 100 miles away.  They were "obviously very excited" to be reunited with their families,  said Coast Guard LT. Cmdr. Christine Igisomar, a coordinator of the search and rescue mission.  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.  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 P-8 Poseidon plane from Kadena Air Force Base in Japan spotted the three on Pikelot Atoll and dropped survival packages.

The next day, a Coast Guard HC-130J Hercules plane from Air Station Barbers Point in Hawaii dropped a radio the men used to report they were thirsty but OK.  "The help sign was pretty visible." Arnold said.  " We could see it from a couple thousand feet in the air."  A similar rescue of three men from Pulawat Atoll happened on Pikelot Atoll in 2020.  Those men spelled out "SOS" on the beach.  An Australian military helicopter crew landed and gave them food and water before the Micronesian patrol boat Ould picked them up.  Well, a happy ending to the story told of the men returning home without too much trouble.  Will they ever venture out on a voyage such as that in the future.  Sure...why not!  With the great rescue crews in that part of the world, why not give them a chance to practice their rescue techniques?  Seems they have had plenty of practice in the past year or two.  Hey...this stuff would make for a good movie....or a good story for a blog!   It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy,