Windward's maritime intelligence log for 15 April records 117 dark fleet vessels in The Gulf, 15 ships transiting the strait of Hormuz that day, and 153.7 million barrels of Iranian crude on water, 84.9 per cent of it China-bound. The National and LSEG independently corroborate the pattern. CENTCOM Commander Admiral Brad Cooper had claimed the same day that US forces had "completely halted economic trade going into and out of Iran by sea" . His "100 per cent" figure now has three datasets against it, and a 38-day satellite blackout removing the only public dataset that could arbitrate a tie.
The gap is explained structurally, not rhetorically. CENTCOM's written order covers Iranian-port traffic only; it does not incorporate the toll-interdiction provision Trump posted to Truth Social, which means vessels routing to non-Iranian ports fall outside the written rules , . Chinese-owned tankers including the Rich Starry and Elpis crossed under that carve-out on day one of the blockade . Windward's synthetic-aperture radar picked out 11 of 19 large vessels near Larak Island on 15 April, confirming the carve-out is active in volume, not symbolic.
The corridor those vessels are using is the Larak-Qeshm channel, the same geographic zone IRGC-linked media published a mine danger chart for on 9 April. Which means commercial ships evading American enforcement are now routing through waters Iran has declared mined. Both blockades operate in the same strait, in different ways. Neither has a signed presidential instrument behind it; both depend on written orders and public posts that have produced incompatible rules of operation for the same vessels.
The press-attribution problem for CENTCOM is not minor. A commander's "100 per cent halt" line is the kind of statement that gets read straight into congressional testimony, Treasury sanctions logic and allied naval planning. Three contradicting datasets make it unsustainable as a factual claim; 84.9 per cent China-bound quantifies Beijing's stake in keeping the carve-out alive. The structural question next fortnight is whether a single mine incident at Larak-Qeshm, which sits well inside credible risk, collapses the carve-out overnight and produces the first mass casualty of a blockade no one has signed.
