GEORGE TOWN: Someone on the beach in Tanjung Bungah clearly had too much time and many pieces of driftwood.
While photographing the coastline with a drone recently, The Star photographer Chan Boon Kai caught sight of a large “SOS” sign laid out on the sand.
It must have taken a bit of arranging because the letters were several metres across and visible from about 120m in the air.
Chan spotted the “distress signal” only after returning to the office and reviewing the drone pictures. The lower parts of the letters seemed to have already been washed away by the high tide.
But there was no marooned sailor or lost hiker waiting to be saved in this populated corner of Penang with a food court across the road.
Someone obviously decided to re-enact a scene from all deserted island movies, arranging driftwood into the universal cry for help.
The SOS signal is over a century old and first became official in 1908 when ships began using radio telegraphy.
At first, the three letters did not mean anything; it was just because the simple dot-dot-dot dash-dash-dash dot-dot-dot pattern was easy to tap out in Morse code and easy to recognise in a hurry.
Only much later did it become popularly linked to the phrase “Save Our Souls”.
Since then, “SOS” has appeared everywhere from wartime bunkers to scout camps and even in Tanjung Bungah, apparently.
If nothing else, this particular SOS shows that someone enjoyed playing make-believe at the beach.
