Castaway naval crew secure rescue from deserted island with clever help signal

THREE mariners stranded on a deserted island in the Pacific Ocean managed to save their lives with a clever call for help.

‘This isn’t the set of Castaway’

A GROUP of castaways stranded on a deserted island in the Pacific have managed to save their lives with a clever call for help.

The three US navy crew members were forced to swim 1.6 kilometres to the uninhabited island of Fanadik after their tiny skiff capsized during rough weather on Monday night.

The 5.7 metre boat ran into trouble a few hours after it departed the Micronesian island of Pulap, the US Coast Guard said.

The mariners were marooned on remote Fanadik for three days, hoping desperately for a rescue, until they came up with an ingenious way to make it happen.

They collected large branches from palm trees around the island and arranged them on the beach to spell the word “help”.

A navy plane flying overhead couldn’t miss the call for help. Picture: US Coast Guard Hawaii Pacific/Facebook

The men were rescued after three days on the long-uninhabited island. Picture: US Coast Guard Hawaii Pacific/Facebook

The men also waved their fluorescent orange life vests around the display of letters, managing to attract the attention of a US navy plane flying overhead.

After the plane relayed their whereabouts, a small boat from Pulap recovered the men from the island with no reported injuries.

“This isn’t the set of Castaway ...” the US coast guard wrote in a Facebook statement detailing the rescue.

The man had also started a fire on the island that helped attract attention to them, coast guard spokesman Lt William White told ABC News.

The US Coast Guard was pretty quick to praise everyone involved in the rescue.

He added without the fire, it could have taken several more hours before the group was found.

The coast guard was first notified that the men were missing at sea just before noon on Tuesday and called on the navy and local vessels in the area for urgent help to locate them.

Two large cargo ships that were part of AMVER, a voluntary global ship reporting system sponsored by the US coast guard, diverted course and searched for a combined 17 hours for the group.

“Our combined efforts coupled with the willingness of many different resources to come together and help, led to the successful rescue of these three men in a very remote part of the Pacific,” White said in a statement.