Seven of the seventeen ships that crossed Hormuz on Tuesday had their transponders off
A vendor tracker’s daily count puts 41 percent of Strait transits running dark, with outbound traffic nearly double inbound. The IMF warns that all such data from the Strait should now be treated with care.
Windward’s Maritime Intelligence Operations Center, in daily highlights dated 30 September, recorded 17 vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz on 29 September — six inbound, 11 outbound — against 16 the day before. Seven ran dark, six of them tankers, and five of the seven dark vessels used the northern corridor. The sample is a single day and the publisher is a commercial AI-analytics firm selling a product, not an official count. The IMF’s PortWatch monitor, which logs the Hormuz disruption as beginning 28 February 2026 and ongoing, warns users explicitly that reports of GPS jamming, AIS spoofing and vessels going dark mean the underlying data should be treated with care. The same Windward bulletin is headed “Three Tankers Struck in Hormuz” and names AL FUNTAS as struck off Musandam; Reuters reported that maritime authorities recorded two ships hit by projectiles on Tuesday. Two against three, on a day’s count of seventeen.
Windward also tracks an oil slick reaching Qeshm’s south coast by 1 October, with most of it expected ashore by 2 October. It appeared a day after the 28 September strike, and the tracker declines to attribute it to AL FUNTAS. On the price screen, Trading Economics showed crude at $90.06 a barrel on 1 October, down 0.40 percent on the day and 1.05 percent over the month, but 48.90 percent above a year ago — that is WTI, not Brent. The last authoritative Brent figure is the EIA’s Short-Term Energy Outlook of 9 September, which put the August spot average at $91, $7 above July, citing constrained Middle East exports, production shut-ins, the renewed US blockade of Iranian oil and fresh OFAC sanctions. The next STEO lands on 6 October.
Assessment: The number to watch is not the price but the corridor. Lloyd’s List Intelligence reports Iran is close to agreeing a new Hormuz shipping route with Oman, running through Iranian and Omani waters “under Iranian management” — which would formalise in paper exactly the control the American blockade exists to break. Meanwhile nobody publishes the figure that would settle whether the blockade works: Iranian crude export volumes. Until Kpler, Vortexa or UKMTO numbers are on the table, transit counts from a vendor and a strike tally that two outlets cannot agree on are what the market is pricing.