The Driscoll Maritime Brief

1. The Week's Signal

Hormuz is running at 4% of normal transits, and what is short is willing owners

The Strait of Hormuz is close to empty. In the seven days ending August 7, UKMTO put full transits at 18 outbound and 21 inbound, each about 4% of the pre-conflict average; AIS-detected traffic is 90% below pre-conflict levels¹². Kpler counted 33 vessels Monday through Thursday against 50 the week before. A normal week ran 130 to 140 before Iran closed the waterway at the start of the war on February 28⁴.

The cargo is there. Iraq's SOMO offered discounts of close to $30 a barrel on Basrah Heavy and Medium for August loading, and Chinese and Indian refiners went looking for tonnage. Nothing fixed: owners are wary of entering the waterway⁵. DMI's read: the clearing constraint is risk appetite and the war-risk terms behind it, not rate.

The reason is priced in hulls and crew. ADNOC says missiles and drones have hit 15 of its vessels since the conflict began, three in a single week, with one crew member killed and 20 injured⁷. The Joint Maritime Information Center holds Hormuz at SEVERE and counts 83 security incidents since March 1. Of the 16 projectile strikes since July 6, UKMTO puts 14 on the southern Omani approaches^33a.

Precious Shipping collected $10.98 million in war-risk proceeds on the bulker Mayuree Naree, a constructive total loss⁸. Across Hormuz and the wider Middle East, the IMO's count since March stands at 64 confirmed incidents and 17 confirmed fatalities⁹.

Blockade enforcement is a second hazard on the same passage plan. As of August 11, CENTCOM said it had redirected 55 commercial vessels, disabled three and boarded two — and fired two Hellfire missiles into the engine room of the Panama-flagged containership Vela Nova in the Gulf of Oman¹⁰¹¹. More than 20 US warships are deployed to enforce it¹². The Master transiting today plans against two armed parties with opposing instructions.

We expect transits to hold near current levels into September. On August 11, Mohsen Rezaei, newly appointed secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, said the strait stays shut until Washington ends the war and the blockade, releases frozen assets and accepts a regional ceasefire. Any Iran-Oman lanes agreement, he said, is separate from the decision to reopen¹³. Foreign Minister Araqchi called the Oman pact "final stages"¹⁴. Taken with Rezaei's conditions, the lanes deal is a routing document held in escrow against a political settlement.

Transit counts deserve a band. Trackers disagree by method. On August 6 Kpler counted 26 Bab el-Mandeb transits where LSEG counted 28⁶. Read a single day's figure as a direction.

2. Market Notes

Freight and rates

• $9,400 per FEU is the Asia to US East Coast box rate so far this week on the Freightos Baltic Index, a new-year high and up from the $9,144 weekly print. The West Coast sits at $7,400¹⁵.
• After carriers blanked 10 sailings in each of the last two weeks, Drewry's World Container Index rose 1% to $4,339 per FEU. Shanghai to New York rose 10% to $8,706¹⁶.
• Black Sea to Mediterranean crude earnings reached a record TCE of $440,948 a day. The figure is the highest in Baltic Exchange data compiled by Bloomberg from July 2008 and is up 140% since the early-July CPC drone attacks¹⁷.

Grain and commodities

• Record-low Danube levels are forcing lighter barge loads toward Constanta while strikes divert Ukrainian grain from Odesa. The corridor that carries a quarter of world wheat trade is being squeezed¹⁸.
• Grain terminals at Novorossiysk halted after a Ukrainian strike damaged facilities and killed three¹⁹.

Ports and congestion

• Panama cuts the Neopanamax maximum draft to 48 feet from August 26 and 47.5 feet from September 3. Those are its fourth and fifth restriction since December 2025²⁰.
• Slot-auction prices are rising as waits build and Gatun Lake continues to fall²¹. One ship won a transit slot at auction for $4 million²².

Regulation and policy

• The Jones Act waiver runs another 90 days, the longest suspension in the law's history. It is now narrowed to case-by-case review of individual voyages²³.

Casualties and incidents

• The 8,401-TEU MSC Silvana VIII sank further off Zhoushan after refloating failed. Salvage removed 3,000 tonnes of fuel²⁴.
• John Amos's review of satellite imagery puts the Caroline Bezengi spill off Oman past 2,000 square kilometers, against a Greenpeace estimate of about 45 square kilometers in late July. The IOPC Funds will not cover cleanup, treating it as an act of war²⁵.

The Panama draft cuts take effect after this issue. The loading decisions they force are next week's story.

3. The Data Section: DMI's Own Numbers

Two DMI collection feeds went live this week. These are their first readings. No week trend is available here, and none is implied.

Mississippi lock queues: L/D 25 reports 214 hours of delay on the first live load

DMI collected the USACE Lock Performance Monitoring System four times daily; the first live load is 2026-08-13 18:00Z. Both fetches are inside the feed's first 24 hours.

At 00:00Z the delay standouts were L/D 25 at 214 hours, L/D 15 at 112, L/D 24 at 108 and L/D 18 at 107. The movement between fetches is the finding to flag: in six hours L/D 25 went from 71 hours to 214, L/D 15 from 173 down to 112, and L/D 22 from 91 to zero. A field that swings that far in a day is not a smooth trailing average, so the figure is taken as published while its definition is reconciled against USACE. Lock 52 returned null on both fetches. The null is published.

Panama: Neopanamax waits run three times the Super class on half the queue

DMI collected Panama Canal Authority Daily Canal Report SY4411RP for 2026-08-13. Canal Waters Time, the authority's own measure of average time in Canal waters, waiting plus transit, is used as published. The queue columns are the report's three snapshots of vessels awaiting transit, at 00:01 and at the 24-hour and 48-hour marks, all observations rather than forecasts.

Neopanamax holds the longest time in Canal waters at 61 hours, more than three times the Super class at 19, on a queue roughly half the size. That is the class the August 26 and September 3 draft cuts land on.

About the ETA numbers

DMI's departure ETAs cover 97 ports with a typical miss of 13.1 hours. ETAs issued en route run 18.5 hours. The stated arrival windows are built to catch the true arrival 80% and 90% of the time; measured, they catch 78.8% and 89.3% — slightly under, and we say so. Method, port panel and full error breakdown: https://driscollmaritime.com/#proof

A day-one feed can be wrong in ways a week of data would expose. Both collectors stay on watch. Any correction lands in a later issue under its own heading.

4. Worth Your Time

• gCaptain, "Rhine River Hits Record Low, Deepening Shipping Crisis": German industry is being throttled by drought, the counterpart to this week's Danube squeeze.
• The Maritime Executive, "Op-Ed: Strait of Hormuz Tests the Limits of the Law of the Sea": what the law says about Iran's claims, in the sharpest framing yet.
• MarineLink, "This is the Last Article on the Jones Act you Ever Need to Read (Really)": an explainer, and it actually finishes the job.
• FreightWaves, "Why 47.5 is a scary number for East Coast ports": East Coast berth windows, with the draft restriction traced to them.
• MarineLink, "The US Says More Oil is Leaving the Middle East, but is it really?": official Gulf flow numbers, put through a skeptical check.