VANCOUVER -- The official search for Scott Smith is over with no sign of the Loverboy bassist, leaving family and friends grieving in limbo.

Without a body, no memorial service is planned, said Smith's friend and Loverboy manager Lou Blair.

"He is missing. A body has not been found and until that happens you can't do anything," Blair said.

"We're just trying to make sure that the family stays as strong as possible."

Smith, 45, was swept off his sailboat, the Sea Major, on Thursday by an eight-metre wave.

The U.S. Coast Guard spent two days searching the cold water off the California coast near San Francisco.

Coast guard officials ended their search Friday.

Based on the temperature of the water, environmental conditions at the time, and the survivability of someone without any exposure equipment, the U.S. Coast Guard has ended its search, petty officer Joe Ford said Monday.

Without any new information "we've pretty much exhausted all of our search efforts," Ford said.

Smith, who lived in the Vancouver suburb of Maple Ridge, had two sons -- Spencer, 17, and Brandon, 15 -- with his estranged wife Donna Smith.

Smith, his girlfriend Yvonne Mayotte and friend William Ellis were sailing from Vancouver to a marina just south of Los Angeles when he went overboard.

When the official search ended, Smith's family called in a marine service to help with a private search, but to no avail.

Loverboy hit it big in the early 1980s with songs like Turn Me Loose and Working for the Weekend, selling more than 23 million records.

After the band stopped recording, Smith did a stint as the late-night DJ at CFOX radio station in Vancouver.

"He'd come in with his entourage of people and they would partake in a couple of beer or so, and when Scott decided he didn't want to do this any more, the operator, the back-up guy would just kind of fill in until the morning show," said program director Bob Mills.

Smith was very well-liked by those who worked with him at the station, said Mills, who never worked with him.

The musician sometimes invited prostitutes in as guests and once broadcast live from a wild post-concert party with Def Leppard.

But in recent years Smith had given up the hard-rocking lifestyle.

"I look back on that and I think it was frivolous, wasteful," he told the Vancouver Province in a recent interview. "In the '80s we had a lot of dough."

Loverboy was a huge success that is still a "staple" on classic rock stations, Mills said.

"This was a band that impacted all around the world and had huge success in their day and really, I think, helped establish Vancouver as a city that had some things happening."

Loverboy's records were produced by the late Bruce Fairbairn, another Vancouver rock legend who also worked with Bon Jovi, Arrowsmith and AC-DC.

Billboard Magazine Canadian correspondent Larry LeBlanc covered Loverboy's entire career.

"The horrible thing was, he was one of the nicest guys. He was a sweetheart."

Loverboy reunited in the 1990s, playing smaller venues across North America.

The band played 90 concerts and earned $1.5 million in concert revenue in 1998. This year they performed 50 shows, earning between $17,500 to $25,000 US per show.

The Calgary-born band finished a reunion tour in October with a charity performance that raised more than $62,000 for juvenile diabetes research.

Smith said he enjoyed the reunion tours.

"The whole weight just lifted off us," he said. "We can jam. We can do some blues songs.

"We're having fun with it now, rather than it being such an intense business thing in the '80s."