Windward

Windward's data, republished by Hellenic Shipping News on 30 July, tracked the Bab el-Mandeb collapse in three cuts: total crossings off 22% since 20 July, tanker transits alone down 39%, and the Saudi-flagged share hit hardest of all, nearly halved to a daily average near 7.5 vessels . The firm ties that steepest fall to Lloyd's-market war-risk cover for Saudi-linked hulls being withdrawn effective 24 July, after Houthi missiles and drones set the Saudi tanker Encelia's bow alight in the strait on 22 July .

The figures give the strait's second, Red Sea-routed chokepoint the same kind of independent tracking Windward has supplied for Hormuz throughout the war, arbitrating between shipowner caution and any official claim about how open the route really is.

Windward flagged a Guyana-flagged, US-sanctioned tanker spoofing an anchor-swing AIS track on 4 July, an evasion pattern its analysts had not previously catalogued in the conflict . The firm caught the spoof only by cross-checking satellite imagery against the vessel's broadcast position, the kind of independent verification AIS data alone cannot supply.

The detection fell inside the wind-down window on a revoked oil waiver that ended Iranian crude sales entirely from 17 July, so Windward's tracking exposed a vessel exploiting a closing legal gap rather than an open one. It follows the firm's April tracking of 14 State Department-sanctioned dark-fleet vessels operating under scrapped ships' identities near Hormuz, part of a growing catalogue of spoofing techniques Windward alone has documented through the war.