Relatives and friends pray for the crew.

MARION COLLINS — one of the army of local volunteers who doled out soup and sandwiches to search teams — knows more than most the perils involved for those trying to eke out a living from the sea.

At the pier in Union Hall yesterday she and her colleagues rushed around ensuring every person involved in the search for the missing crewmen had something hot to drink and nutritious to eat.

Her late father, John Burns, was the skipper on a trawler which capsized years ago in roughly the same area that the Tit Bonhomme went down.