Day 248 in Hormuz: the strait closed, and the spreadsheet broke first
Eight months into the closure, the operators coping best are not the ones with the best routes. They are the ones who can see clearly.
Before 28 February, IMF PortWatch counted around 85 transits a day through the Strait of Hormuz. On 25 October, it counted two.
That single number tells you the strait is shut. It tells you nothing about what to do next. Owners, charterers, P&I clubs and salvors are not short of headlines. They are short of a picture they can trust enough to act on.
What the numbers say right now
Around 38% of seaborne crude, 29% of LPG and 19% of LNG moved through Hormuz in the week before the war, according to UNCTAD figures reported by Al Jazeera.
Lloyd's List Intelligence counted 104 non-Iranian-linked transits in the week of 5 to 11 October. That is a week's traffic in a strait that once handled roughly that many in a day.
The same brief logged at least 28 attacks or security incidents in the first half of October, the highest monthly total since the war began. UKMTO says most attacked vessels are not reporting, so the true figure is higher.
Iran's list of "non-compliant vessels" has grown to 124 ships, from 44 when it was announced on 24 August.
In June, Allianz estimated that around 1,150 vessels, worth about $125bn with their cargo, were waiting in the Gulf, with up to 20,000 seafarers affected.
Brent settled at $113.43 on 30 October. Talks brokered by Qatar had entered a third day without a breakthrough by 1 November.
The real problem is decision speed.
Every one of those figures moves daily. A vessel's sanctions exposure can change because a list was updated overnight. A safe waiting position can stop being safe in hours. A charter party clause that looked academic in January now decides who pays for months of delay.
Most maritime businesses still run on email chains, spreadsheets and a handful of subscriptions that do not talk to each other. In a normal year, that is slow. In a closure, it is a liability because the decision window is shorter than the time it takes to assemble the facts.
Allianz put the shift plainly in its 2026 Safety & Shipping Review: shipping is moving from "just-in-time" to "just-in-case". Just-in-case only works if you know what you have, where it is and what it is exposed to, all the time.
What resilient operators are building
One view of the fleet. AIS, satellite imagery, UKMTO and JMIC advisories, sanctions lists and voyage data in a single dashboard, with the source of every data point visible.
Crew welfare tracking. Who is aboard each waiting ship, when they joined, and what supplies and relief are due. With up to 20,000 seafarers affected, this is a duty of care, not a nice-to-have.
Scenario costing. War-risk premiums, demurrage, reroute fuel and general average exposure modelled per voyage, so commercial teams can price options in minutes, not days.
An evidence trail. Every compliance decision is logged with the data it was based on, because the questions from insurers, banks and regulators will come later.
The takeaway
When the strait reopens, the lesson will not expire with it. The next disruption, whether it is a chokepoint, a cyber attack or a casualty, will reward the same thing: clean data, joined up, in front of the people who decide.
That is the work vi-tech does for maritime and salvage clients, with a Master Mariner on our leadership team who has made these calls at sea.
