Writing out HELP or SOS while stranded on a desert island is such a cliche that it has its own TV Tropes page. The US Coast Guard says that it actually happened when, on Tuesday, it rescued three men who became stranded on the island of Pikelot in Micronesia. This 31-acre island is 100 miles away from the nearest settlement.
When a relative of the three men, who had set out across the sea on a 20-foot boat with an outboard motor, reported them missing, the Coast Guard launched a search and rescue mission. A US Navy aircraft spotted them and snapped this image. Then the cutter Oliver Henry picked them up.
It's a good thing that they spelled HELP correctly, as The Far Side warned us many years ago.
-via Kottke
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I think that I remember that episode.
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I thought of the 1967 Gilligan's Island episode "Splashdown" where they tried to signal "SOS" to the passing spacecraft using burning logs, but Gilligan ended up turning it into "SOL" - one of the astronauts is named Sol Tobias, and he thinks the "SOL" is to honor him.
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The Far Side "Helf" was the first thing that came to my mind when I heard about this story.
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