DUNMORE East is awash with reminders of past tragedies.

Along the short road down from the tiny main street to the harbour, a poignant monument commemorates the men from the Waterford village whose lives have been lost at sea.

The crew of the Pere Charles - Billy O'Connor (50), Tomas Hennessy (32), Pat Hennessy (48), Pat Coady (27) and Andriy Dyrin (32) - are the latest victims who will have their names carved onto the large marble façade that already displays the names of over 150 other lost men.

As searches for the five bodies, and the two crew members of the Kinsale boat the Honey Dew II, were hampered by horrendous off-shore conditions this weekend, grieving relatives stared teary eyed from the Dunmore East and Kinsale pier walls, wondering if they would ever be able to give their loved ones a burial on land.

It is not unknown for the remains of a local drowned at sea to remain there - never to be found - and a heart-rending poem carved into the Dunmore East harbour memorial pays tribute to these 'Souls of the Sea'.

John O'Connor's poem opens with the lines:

"On misty nights off Dunmore East so the story goes, Twinkling lights far out at sea shine out in sad repose, No one knows who they are but the talk is on the quays, They're the ghosts of long lost ships and men who sailed the seas" While the crew of the 20 metre twin-rig Pere Charles have not been recovered, the general consensus among locals and the search and rescue services is that the bodies of the five men remain in the wreck on the seabed.

"We believe that the men were working inside the boat when she went down and they did not have time to escape as she sank so quickly, " said a member of the Garda Water Unit.

Just yards from the memorial to the 'Souls of the Sea', the small blue and white Boyne Harvester trawler is docked.

That small boat, like much of the harbour, is a further example of the complicated relationship the people of this place have with the sea.

Late last November, the body of Louth fisherman and father-of-four Paddy McCabe was found off the coast of Wales. He had fallen overboard the Boyne Harvester boat while shell fishing out of Dunmore East on 1 November.

Today his boat bobs up and down in the harbour water as the families of the sea's latest five victims await news of the rescue mission in the RNLI's lifeboat centre nearby. There they are comforted by local members of the RNLI's ladies guild, away from the prying eyes of the media.

Search The grieving people of Dunmore East were touched on Friday night when a number of trawlers made journeys from as far away as Crosshaven, Kinsale and other ports to aid in the search for the missing Pere Charles and Honey Dew II trawlers.

Individual fishing communities are tight knit, as are the people who work in the industry around Ireland's coast. "As soon as I heard that the second boat went down I got my crew together and we have enough food and provisions with us to go out searching for five days, " said a skipper from Crosshaven. "The fishing community is really tight in Ireland and we will not stop until we recover those bodies. Those men were like brothers to me."

Most of the dead men's relatives in Dunmore East were too distraught to speak to the media but a close relative of the Pere Charles skipper Tom Hennessy talked emotionally about his loss to the Sunday Tribune this weekend.

"Tom, like all the men on that boat, was a decent man who was out on the sea to get money to put food on the table for his family, " he said.

"I worked on that boat with those lads before and all of them were very close. They were the sort of people who would give each other money just to make sure that they each had enough to support their families."

The man, in his early 30s, was also very angry at the way his close friends were taken away while fishing for herring.

"Those men would not even have been out on that sea if it were not for the governmentimposed regulations that force fishermen across Ireland out into these conditions.

"No matter how stormy the conditions are at sea, the skipper has to ring in to the port to say that their trawler is full and then wait at sea for four hours before they can come back in to the harbour and have their fish weighed."

While it has been suggested that the Pere Charles had taken in water causing it to sink, locals are adamant that the boat had recently been tested to ensure that it met all safety regulations. Hennessy, they say, was a consummate skipper who "didn't take risks."

"He was a perfectionist in the way he went about his job, " his friend said. "It must have been a freak accident that caused the boat to sink."

A next-door neighbour of Pat Coady, the youngest of the dead men, spoke fondly of him and his lost colleagues. "No matter who you ask in Dunmore East they will have good things to say about those men. I knew all of them and they were the most gentle and nice men you could meet."

Meanwhile, struggling to find words to describe the atmosphere in Dunmore East this weekend, the parish priest Fr Brian Power said: "The whole community has been left reeling and in a state of shock. Nobody knows how to deal with this. Everybody is just hoping that the bodies will be recovered from the water."

As the coastal communities of Dunmore East and Kinsale pray that their loved ones can be reclaimed from the treacherous sea that took their lives, the recovery mission continues from daybreak to nightfall.

Speaking in the incident room at the Irish Coastguard Service building in Dunmore East, Ger Geraghty, the coastguard's incident manager, explained how the recovery missions for the crewmen of the two wrecks were being conducted.

"The search for the Pere Charles is focused on an area from Dunmore East in an easterly direction to Carnsore Point. There is a coastal search along the coast for the Pere Charles involving groups of up to 10 volunteers from Dunmore East, Kilmore Quay, Fethard, Tramore, Bonmahon, and Ardmore."

These groups walk along the coast each day checking all beaches, rocks and cliffs in case anything has been washed up from the wreck.

Yesterday morning, two mini-buses full of friends and family of the victims of the Honey Dew vessel went to Bonmahon to join in the coastguard's coastal search.

At sea, the Dunmore East and Ballycotton lifeboats as well as the navy's LE Eithne vessel and over 20 fishing vessels went out looking for the two sunken trawlers yesterday.

In the air a Sikorski S61N Irish coastguard helicopter, with a crew of two drivers and two winch men, searched over an area stretching from Mine Head over to Carnsore Point from the air.

Geraghty, who is based in the Irish coastguard's headquarters in Dublin, has been moved to head up the incident room in Dunmore East and has got little sleep since his arrival in the southeast after the first trawler tragedy.

"I have been in here making sure that we can do everything possible to recover the crew men and not getting sleep is only a minor sacrifice compared to what the families are going through, " he said.

Gardaí and naval RIBs (Rigid Inflatable Boats) or speed boats, each manned by a navigation officer and three divers, made a number of attempts to go to the point off Dunmore East where the Pere Charles sank, but the high wind conditions and high water swell of up to five metres made it too dangerous for them to dive.

While two garda and navy RIBS went out together and were less than 100 yards apart they were unable to see each other and decided it was too dangerous to attempt a dive on Friday.

Late on Friday evening the LE Eithne surveyed the area where the Pere Charles sank and divers are now awaiting calmer waters before they can dive for the bodies.

Sea bed Most of yesterday's search focused on attempts to locate where the wreck of the Honey Dew II lies on the sea bed. The authorities believe they are 95% sure where the Pere Charles lies. "We are going to keep attempting to dive but it looks as though it could be Monday before the swell goes down enough to allow us to dive, " Sergeant John Bruton of the garda water unit said yesterday.

Hundreds of people attended an ecumenical service in Kinsale on Friday for Ger Bohan, the father of four and skipper of the Honey Dew II, and his missing crewman Tomasz Jagla, who is married with two children.

Both men's wives lit candles at the service.

Maintaining a vigil on the pier in Kinsale, Bohan's wife Mary cried, "Bring him home, bring him home, I just want to have him home."

While two of the Honey Dew crewmen, Lithuanians Voktoz Losez and Vladimir Kostvy, miraculously survived for 20 hours in a life raft, the thoughts of everyone from Kinsale to Dunmore East are with the families of the seven missing men.

As the poem on the memorial in Dunmore East concludes:

"They'll haul their nets, hoist their sails, set their course no more, Say a prayer for the souls of the sea who rest just off Dunmore."