On March 1st, a bulk carrier called the Run Chen 2 went dark. Her AIS transponder stopped broadcasting at 9:30 PM local time, just as she approached the western mouth of the Strait of Hormuz. She reappeared about seven hours later in the Gulf of Oman. Whatever happened in between, she didn't want anyone to see.
She wasn't the only one. Between 40 and 50 ships went offline in the same region that night. Some were at anchor, hedging their bets. Others made the same midnight run. By the following morning, maritime intelligence platforms were reporting that the number of dark vessels was still climbing.
The Strait of Hormuz — 21 miles wide at its narrowest, two-mile-wide shipping lanes in each direction — had effectively shut down. Not with a gate or a blockade, but with something more powerful: the withdrawal of insurance. When underwriters pull war-risk coverage for a body of water, the ships stop coming. Doesn't matter what the captain thinks. The ship's flag state, its P&I club, its charterer, its cargo owner — any one of them can say no. And they all said no.
What happened next was the fastest rewrite of global shipping economics anyone has ever seen.
The Rate Explosion
The Clarksea Index — Clarksons Research's weighted barometer covering every commercial shipping segment — hit $53,190 per day on Friday. That's an all-time record. It's only crossed $50,000 three times in its history. For context, the 2025 average was $26,836. The index effectively doubled in a week.
But the Clarksea Index is an average. The extremes are where the story gets wild.
VLCC spot fixtures hit $770,000 per day — a world record.
A 2010-built VLCC called the Kalamos, controlled by the Greek shipping family Embiricos, was fixed by Bharat Petroleum at $770,000 per day. Three quarters of a million dollars. Per day. For a ship that carries two million barrels of crude oil and was probably worth less than that on the secondhand market a month ago.
VLCC spot rates on the Middle East-to-China route — the world's busiest crude oil lane — have gone from under $90,000 per day in late December to over $400,000 per day by Monday. Most of that move happened in the last ten days.
Clarksons, not known for hyperbole, put it carefully: "Alongside huge operational risk and stress, shipping markets are seeing 'disruption upside' for the moment."
"Disruption upside." That's a phrase doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Why Hormuz Is Different
When Houthi attacks disrupted the Red Sea in late 2023, the shipping industry had a bad option that still worked: go around Africa. The Cape of Good Hope route adds 10 to 14 days to an Asia-Europe voyage, burns 30-40% more fuel, and costs millions per trip. Expensive and slow. But cargo still moves. The Red Sea has a bypass.
The Strait of Hormuz does not.
It's the sole maritime passage connecting the Persian Gulf to the open ocean. No alternative route. No canal. No going around. Approximately 20 million barrels of oil per day — roughly one-fifth of global consumption — flow through this channel. So does a fifth of the world's LNG. Eighty-four percent of it heads to Asia: 38% to China alone, 15% to India, 12% to South Korea, 11% to Japan.
When the Red Sea closed, prices spiked and adjusted. When Hormuz closes, markets break.
The Dual Chokepoint Problem
Here's the thing nobody planned for: both chokepoints went down at the same time.
The Red Sea was already compromised. Houthi attacks had been rerouting traffic around Africa for over a year. Shipping lines had adapted — longer transits, higher costs, but manageable. Then Hormuz closed on top of it.
Container-mag.com called it a "dual chokepoint crisis without precedent in modern container shipping." That's not editorializing. There genuinely isn't a historical analogue. Even during the 1980s Tanker War, both chokepoints were never simultaneously inaccessible.
Maersk suspended all vessel transits through the Strait of Hormuz. Hapag-Lloyd did the same, calling it "not discretionary but a necessary response." CMA CGM instructed every vessel inside the Gulf and every vessel bound for the region to proceed to shelter. The three biggest container lines in the world, all saying the same thing: stay out.
Hapag-Lloyd slapped a $1,500-per-TEU war risk surcharge on Persian Gulf cargo. For reefer containers: $3,500. Maersk went further — $1,800 per TEU, $3,000 per 40-foot box.
200 Tankers Going Nowhere
Lloyd's List reported around 200 compliant tankers stranded as the strait closure froze Gulf traffic. Not dark-fleet vessels or sanctions evaders — legitimate, fully insured ships that followed the rules, sailed into the Gulf for a routine crude loading, and now can't leave.
Their owners are burning tens of thousands of dollars a day in operating costs while earning nothing. Their crews are stuck. Their cargo slots are empty.
Meanwhile, Gulf oil producers have a different problem: they can't export. Storage is filling up. Saudi Arabia has reportedly started cutting production because there's nowhere to put the oil. You can pump all you want. If it can't get on a ship, it stays in the ground.
Poten & Partners described the situation as "not sustainable," predicting that vessels will eventually seek employment elsewhere, forcing Gulf producers to cut output further. When that happens, the ton-mile demand currently inflating freight rates collapses. SEB analysts warned of "overpopulation in Atlantic markets" as displaced tankers pile up on the other side of the world.
So the rate spike has an expiration date. It's just not clear when.
Going Dark
For anyone who works with vessel tracking data, the most striking thing about Hormuz right now is the silence.
Argus Media reported that ship traffic through the strait has fallen 94% since early March. But even that understates it, because the ships that are transiting are increasingly doing it dark — AIS transponders switched off, invisible to tracking platforms.
The Run Chen 2 wasn't an outlier. The Greek tanker Shenlong Spirit, carrying a million barrels of Saudi crude for Dynacom Tankers, switched off her transponder on March 4 while sailing toward Hormuz. She didn't reappear until she was near the Indian coastline. A midnight run across one of the most surveilled waterways on Earth, completely invisible.
We track vessel positions through AIS — it's what we do at VesselAPI. Watching a waterway that normally handles hundreds of transits per day go almost completely silent is genuinely unsettling. I don't have a good framework for what happens if this becomes the new normal.
What It Costs You
Oil hit $119 a barrel on Monday — a single-day percentage gain not seen since 1988. That flows directly into fuel prices, electricity costs, and the price of anything made from petrochemicals, which is most things. The UK is already facing projections of a 93% surge in gas prices.
Container shipping costs are climbing too. Even if your goods don't touch the Persian Gulf, the rerouting ripple effect tightens capacity everywhere. Ships that would've been available for trans-Pacific or trans-Atlantic routes are now tied up on longer diversions or sitting idle in the Gulf.
Asian markets reacted on Monday: the Nikkei dropped over 5%, the KOSPI fell 6%.
Where This Goes
Nobody knows how long this lasts. The freight rate spike could sustain if the strait stays closed. It could collapse if producers cut output and ton-mile demand falls. It could get worse.
A VLCC earning under $90,000 a day three months ago is now earning nearly ten times that. Insurance underwriters rewrote the map overnight. Three major container lines abandoned the same waterway within 48 hours of each other. The economics of global shipping shifted faster than anyone thought possible.
We've been pulling maritime news into a single feed at vesselapi.com/news — useful when things move this fast. New surcharges, route changes, and rate updates are dropping daily, and it's genuinely hard to keep up across a dozen different sources.
The Persian Gulf at night.
The strait is 21 miles wide. The global economy, it turns out, isn't much wider.
