JINDO, South Korea — No. 150, a boy, had a snaggletooth. No. 111, a girl, was wearing pink slippers, and an elastic hairband on her right wrist. No. 87 had on pajama pants with teddy bears.

No. 93 was clutching a Roman Catholic rosary in her left hand.

The descriptions, some rendered in forensic detail, are the only proof that many parents of the teenagers who died on South Korea’s doomed ferry have of their children’s fate. As bodies are recovered from the sunken ship, they are carried to shore and the process of identifying them begins — starting with the descriptions written on whiteboards in a tent set up for the grieving relatives of the students and other victims.

Eom Ji-young was one of the many mothers waiting for word of their children.

Several times an hour, she has risen from the mattress in the tent city where she has kept vigil since the ferry sank last week. Her head bowed, her shoulders slumped, Ms. Eom, 37, has walked down the road and entered the tent with the five whiteboards, searching for evidence of her 16-year-old daughter, Park Yae-ji.

New descriptions were added less often than Ms. Eom checked, but she went anyway, just to be sure.

“I can’t sleep,” she said after one visit, a school photo of Yae-ji hanging from a lanyard around her neck. “What if she comes in? What if she’s waiting for me? She’s been waiting for me all this time inside the sea, and I don’t sleep.”

As Ms. Eom has moved back and forth between the two points that have delineated the geography of her life here, her mind was on a third place, in mist-shrouded waters off the south coast of Jindo. Eleven miles offshore, teams of divers working round the clock are urgently searching the ship, which rests upside down on the seabed in dark waters at a depth of more than 100 feet.

It is slow, hard, dangerous work, yet the dive teams have been moving as quickly as possible to find and recover the bodies — to help provide relatives with closure but also to outpace decomposition, which has already begun to make identification difficult.

A vast anchorage of rescue boats and support vessels — military and civilian, barges and warships, powerboats and fishing trawlers — have convened at the site of the sinking. At the center of this constellation are two buoys marking the site of the wreck and a nucleus of rigid-hulled inflatable boats carrying divers, dozens of whom plunge into the Yellow Sea each day.

They have descended in pairs, and in shifts often lasting about 30 minutes, progressively making their way through the waters that have filled the ship’s corridors and cabins.