The scallop boat and its four fishermen have been missing since Friday night.

PORTLAND (AP) – The Coast Guard on Monday suspended its search for a scallop boat with four Maine fishermen on board that disappeared in waters off Nantucket.

The air and sea search for the Candy B II went on for more than 60 hours and covered a 4,656-square-mile area before being halted shortly after 1 p.m.

“The decision to end a search is never an easy one,” said Lt. Cmdr. Pat Cook of the Coast Guard command center in Boston. “However, we have saturated the search area with surface and air units for more than 60 hours and we feel that if they were on the surface, we would have found them.”

The four crewmen aboard the 46-foot boat were still listed as missing, said Petty Officer Amy Thomas, a Coast Guard spokeswoman.

The wooden boat was based in Waldoboro, but was operating out of Provincetown, Mass., when it was reported missing Friday night after the boat’s emergency radio beacon was activated 50 miles southeast of Nantucket.

The Coast Guard met with members of the crewmen’s families earlier Monday at the Coast Guard station in Rockland and notified them about the decision to suspend the search.

Thomas said the Coast Guard had no theory on what happened to the boat and would re-examine its decision to suspend the search if warranted by new information.

Coast Guard officials arrived at the scene Friday night to find the boat’s radio beacon floating in the water among debris. A six-person life raft and survival suits were believed to be aboard the boat.

Officials identified the fishermen as Howard “Cappy” Crudell, 38, and Brandon Feyler, 17, both of of Warren; Adrian Randall, 25, of Rockland, and Ralph “Bubba” Boyington, 34, of Waldoboro. Crudell, a longtime fisherman, was the boat captain. The boat is owned by Scott Knowlton, who was not aboard when it disappeared.

Feyler was a trainee on the boat and expecting his first child with Crudell’s stepdaughter. Boyington is the father of four girls and 6-month-old baby boy. Randall has been fishing for only a few years.

Boyington’s parents, Charlene and Ralph Boyington, said their son planned to soon give up scallop fishing for work closer to home. They said he was working on the scallop boat to earn extra cash to fix his 36-foot urchin boat.

Commercial fishing is inherently dangerous, with fishermen working with heavy equipment and contending with bad weather and other vessels at sea.

Investigators from the Marine Safety Office in Providence, R.I., are searching for any merchant vessels that may have been operating in the area where the Candy B II was lost.

In August 2001, two fishermen from Maine and another from Gloucester, Mass., were killed when their boat, the 83-foot Starbound out of Rockland, was struck by a ship 130 miles east of Cape Ann, Mass.

The Coast Guard alleged that the Virgo, a 541-foot Cypriot-flagged oil tanker with a Russian crew, was responsible for a fatal hit-and-run accident as it traveled from Boston to Newfoundland.

Mark Doughty of Yarmouth, James Sanfilippo of Thomaston and Thomas Frontiero of Gloucester, Mass. died. The captain, Joseph Marcantonio, was the sole survivor.