3 Mariners Rescued from Island After Spelling Out ‘SOS’ in Sand

“Three missing mariners were rescued from a tiny, uninhabited Pacific island on Tuesday thanks to an ‘SOS’ message they wrote in the sand, authorities said.

Guardsmen from the 203rd Air Refueling Squadron, Hawaii Air National Guard (ANG) and the 171st Air Refueling Wing, Pennsylvania National Guard found the men on the tiny island of Pikelot, Yap after they failed to show up to their intended destination on July 29, according to a press release from the Andersen Air Force Base in Guam.

The search teams were able to locate the mariners due to an “SOS” message that they had written in the sand of the remote island in the Federated States of Micronesia, southwest of Guam.

‘We were toward the end of our search pattern,’ U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Jason Palmeira-Yen, the KC-135 pilot, said in a statement. ‘We turned to avoid some rain showers and 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.’”

View the whole story here: https://people.com/human-interest/3-stranded-mariners-rescued-from-island-spelt-sos-in-sand/

Originally published at https://www.focusonthegoodnews.com on August 5, 2020.