THREE men drifting and lost in a small boat off northern Australia for more than three weeks have been found after they used their mobile phones to send text messages to grieving relatives.

In a story of survival that rivals that of two Tasmanian gold miners rescued on Monday after two weeks trapped underground, John Tabo, 38, his son, John Jr, 20, and nephew, Tom, 16, were found late on Tuesday, two weeks after they had been given up for dead when an air and sea search for them was called off.

The three Torres Strait islanders, missing since April 17, survived by eating raw squid and shellfish and drinking rainwater. They moulded metal tins aboard their disabled 16ft (4.9m) open boat into makeshift hats to protect themselves from the sun, and fashioned paddles out of jerry cans.

They were presumed to have become victims of Cyclone Monica, which devastated northeastern Australia around the time that they disappeared.

At noon on Tuesday relatives of the men on Murray Island, in the Torres Strait between Australia and Papua New Guinea, received a burst of seven text messages. “They said, ‘Need help, fuel, food’ and they indicated to their relations on Murray Island that they were in the Dwyer Reef area, and so that’s where we focused an immediate search with a helicopter,” Inspector Russell Rhodes, of the Queensland police, said.

“They were spotted and winched into the chopper at 4.10pm on Tuesday afternoon, after 22 days at sea.”

Mr Rhodes was at Torres Strait’s main police station on Thursday Island when word came through that the men had been picked up. “When they [the helicopter crew] said they had found them, there was just silence for about a minute. We just thought that was incredible.”

Mr Rhodes said that the men had been found because they had conserved the batteries on their mobile phones. Reception is possible only within a certain distance of each of the islands in the Torres Strait and it is common practice for those in boats to switch off their phones once the signal fails, to save battery power.

The three men, he said, had switched a phone on briefly each day to check for a signal. It was only on Tuesday, when they received a faint signal, that they sent the messages. Police believed that their boat was blown off course by Cyclone Monica on April 17 as the men journeyed from their home on Murray Island to Yorke Island, about 43 miles northwest, to pick up volleyball players. They became disorientated and ran out of fuel.

Aven Noah, of the Torres Strait Island Media Association, said that the men, now home, had spotted an island on the horizon and used their hands and makeshift paddles to head towards it, knowing that there would be a mobile phone signal offshore. “They did about 30 paddles and then they stopped, and they continued to do that until they got closer,” Mr Noah said.

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