Ships with no Iranian tie quit Hormuz

Lloyd's List Intelligence counted 78 vessel transits through the Strait of Hormuz in the week of 3 to 9 August, against 95 the week before, in a brief published on Wednesday 12 August⁠¹. Of that 78, 45 carried no Iranian link, down from 63. The total fell 18 per cent while the non-Iranian count fell 29 per cent, so the strait is not emptying evenly.

Eighteen owners with no Iranian connection made a different choice this week from the one they made last week. Each of those hulls is a cargo that did not sail, a delivery date that moved, and a war-risk premium an underwriter decided was not worth paying. One caveat travels with the series: this briefing's own figure of 84 weekly transits, published on 7 August, counts to a different week boundary and cannot be added to it.

The two trackers part company on where the remaining ships have gone. Kpler calls the passage now carrying most tanker traffic "the Iranian route", a corridor Tehran announced by itself in April that the International Maritime Organization (IMO), the United Nations shipping regulator, has never approved and that neither Washington nor Brussels recognises⁠². Lloyd's, in the same 12 August brief, reports activity concentrating instead on the Omani coast, where masters can stay outside Iran's traffic system altogether⁠³. Both see shipping abandoning the historic centre line. Neither agrees on which shore it moved towards, and the gap is not a rounding error: one reading has Iran gaining control of the waterway, the other has shipping routing around Iran entirely.

For Tuesday 11 August the day counts do not reconcile either. CNN, citing Kpler, reported 14 crossings, 11 of them on the Iranian route and none on the centre line⁠⁴. A Reuters wire, also citing Kpler and captured at 04:20 GMT the following morning, reported six crossings and gave no route split at all⁠⁵. Neither is Kpler's own publication for that date, so both stand here and neither is settled. Before the war Kpler counted 120 to 140 crossings a day. The drop lands in the same week Iran's security council chief told China's ambassador the strait reopens only when the United States ends its war.