Nine ships and a fire off Bukha

On Wednesday a tanker was struck by “an unknown projectile” about 11 nautical miles off Bukha, on Oman’s side of the Strait of Hormuz, the UK Maritime Trade Operations centre said¹. A fire broke out and the ship is “now at anchor”¹. “All crew are reported as safe. There is no reported environmental impact at this time,” UKMTO said¹. TradeWinds, the shipping paper, says fresh incidents have pushed the confirmed tally of Iranian attacks beyond 30 vessels in three weeks³. AFP notes that attacks have increased as Washington escorts more ships through the strait¹.

The counter. Hormuz.now, a site that counts commercial crossings from ships’ public AIS signals, had logged nine crossings by 14:26 UTC on Wednesday: five into the Gulf and four out, one of them a small products tanker². Its rolling seven-day average is 2.3 crossings a day, against a pre-crisis baseline of 84.8². The ships it saw today were mostly bulk carriers and general cargo, bound for ports such as Jebel Ali, Sohar and Umm Qasr².

Read the method before the number. The site is candid about what it misses. Its counts are “AIS-visible only and miss ships running dark”, and it excludes small craft; six of those crossed by the same hour². A ship that switches off its transponder to avoid being targeted does not appear. So the counter is a floor, not a total. The official comparison, IMF PortWatch, publishes several days late; its latest day is 18 October².

Why this matters to you. Fuel and freight prices in Europe still lean on this water. A floor of nine visible ships tells you the route is not working normally; it does not tell you it is closed. A fire tells you the risk is real; it does not tell you traffic has stopped. When two careful sources disagree, the gap is usually method, not malice.

The constructive habit is the same as this morning: take the count with its footnote. The day the visible number rises for a week in a row, without fires, that will be the news.