Ten ships and a letter to Washington

Yesterday evening this desk counted nine ships by mid-afternoon. The complete UTC day closed at ten AIS-visible commercial crossings of the Strait of Hormuz: six into the Gulf and four out, one of them a tanker and nine cargo ships¹. The tanker was a small products carrier, 105 metres long, bound for the UAE¹. The average since 19 October is 5.7 crossings a day, against a pre-crisis baseline of 84.8¹. Desk arithmetic: ten crossings is about 12% of a normal day.

The method, again. The counter sees only ships that broadcast their position; its counts “miss ships running dark”, and it leaves out small craft, of which nine more crossed on Wednesday¹. The official comparison, IMF PortWatch, has still not published anything after 18 October¹. So ten is a floor, and a floor that moved up.

The letter. Overnight Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, took his case to a Western newspaper. “Iran is prepared to give diplomacy another chance if we see strong evidence of a sincere desire on the part of the US,” he wrote in the Financial Times, as reported by Bloomberg². The price of that evidence is specific: lift the naval blockade and return to the Islamabad memorandum signed in June, under which Iran was to reopen the strait and the US was to lift the blockade, release frozen oil funds and remove sanctions². “If they adhere to these conditions, they should know that the Strait will be fully opened,” he said in an earlier interview with Iraqi media². In that interview he also claimed Washington had accepted Iran’s conditions for a seven-day reopening plan but wanted extra clauses; the US has not confirmed his account³.

The other side of the table. Bloomberg notes that the US has shown “little appetite” to return to the June memorandum, and that President Trump has suggested he may restart bombing after the 3 November midterms². Brent rose above $110 a barrel on Wednesday².

Why this matters to you. Your fuel bill does not read op-eds; it reads tanker crossings and insurance quotes. A minister naming conditions in public is useful, because conditions can be met or refused on the record. But until the visible count climbs for days in a row, the strait is open in print and narrow in fact. Nothing here is advice.