ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) – With the weather improving Sunday, the Coast Guard planned for a helicopter to lower a salvage team to a soybean freighter that broke in two off Alaska’s coast – a key step toward cleaning up a destructive, oily mess stretching for miles from the vessel.

Since the 738-foot Selendang Ayu wrecked Wednesday, rough seas and heavy wind have kept authorities from boarding either half of the ship. They must get on board to determine how much of the 440,000 gallons of bunker oil and 30,000 gallons of diesel fuel have leaked.

Coast Guard Chief Petty Officer Darrel Wilson said waves on Sunday were between 14 and 16 feet and winds had eased to about 30 knots, milder than the 24-foot seas and 50-knot winds that pounded the ship Saturday.

Wind and waves were forecast to continue subsiding today.

The Coast Guard was proceeding cautiously, Wilson said, to avoid more casualties. Six crew members from the ship were lost when a helicopter crashed after lifting them off the vessel before it wrecked; four other people were rescued. A search for the missing crew – five from India and one from the Philippines – was suspended Friday night.

The Malaysian freighter lost power to its main engine on Tuesday and wrecked Wednesday on the west side of Unalaska Island in the Aleutian Island chain, despite efforts to control the ship.

The spill is near a wildlife refuge, home to sea lions, harbor seals, sea otters, tanner crabs and halibut. Environmental officials are concerned that resident bald eagles may scavenge on any oiled birds that could wash ashore.

The weather, however, also has been delaying cleanup efforts along the coast. A Department of Fish and Wildlife response vessel was to try Sunday to transport two biologists and two wildlife rehabilitation experts from Dutch Harbor, on the side of Unalaska Island opposite from the wreck, to Skan Bay, a few miles north of the freighter.

If a salvage team can be put on board the ship, it will survey the damage and try to pinpoint where the spilled oil is coming from, Wilson said.

A private fishing vessel hired to be a wildlife recovery and rehabilitation platform was on standby. Two other fishing vessels, meanwhile, were expected to attempt to deploy more oil containment boom in estuaries and streams near the grounded freighter.

When the freighter split in half, it was over the No. 2 tank, which had a capacity of 140,000 gallons. Coast Guard officials say that appears to be the oil that flowed out of the ship.

Along the coast of the island, about 800 miles southwest of Anchorage, balls of oil about the size of tennis balls and ping pong balls have been seen in the sheen.

Oil has reached the headlands east of the wreck. Northwest winds also have pushed oil into Skan Bay a few miles north of the wreck. The Coast Guard has unconfirmed reports of a sheen about 10 miles north of the wreck in the much larger Makushin Bay.

Some of the oil that leaked from the vessel may have already balled up and sunk to the ocean bottom. Coast Guard officials say less oil has been streaming from the wreck since the initial surge when the ship broke up.

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