Maritime Security and Safety
Global Maritime Safety Watch: Tanker Collision, Gulf Attacks and Container Losses Dominate Weekly Incident Log
Global Maritime Safety Watch: Tanker Collision, Gulf Attacks and Container Losses Dominate Weekly Incident Log
By Okeoghene Onoriobe | Waterways News Correspondent
A string of serious maritime safety incidents across global shipping lanes last week — including a deadly tanker-fishing vessel collision off India, coordinated projectile strikes on commercial ships near the UAE, and fresh Iranian attacks on fuel tankers in Iraqi waters — underscores the compounding navigational and geopolitical hazards confronting the international shipping community.
Tanker Strikes Fishing Trawler Off Kerala; Two Fishermen Feared Dead
Two fishermen are feared dead after the Panamanian-flagged chemical tanker Solis collided with the locally registered fishing trawler St. Joseph in the Arabian Sea on 8 March.
The collision occurred approximately 120 nautical miles off the coast of Kerala, India, where the fishing vessel had been anchored. The Solis struck the trawler around noon, causing severe damage that sent the smaller vessel to the seabed within minutes.
Nine survivors were rescued by the Solis crew, while the Indian Coast Guard vessel ICGS Anagh responded promptly to the scene, recovering the survivors and transporting them to Vizhinjam Port. A search for the two missing fishermen remained ongoing at the time of reporting.
India’s Directorate General of Shipping has since opened a formal investigation into the incident. The Solis, built in 2003, measures 145.5 metres in length with a gross tonnage of 11,573.
Two Commercial Vessels Hit by Projectiles Near UAE Waters
Two commercial ships sustained damage from suspected projectile strikes off the coast of the United Arab Emirates on 11 March, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) has confirmed.
The Japanese-flagged container ship One Majesty was struck approximately 25 nautical miles northwest of Ras Al Khaimah at around 01:58 UTC. The vessel’s captain reported an impact from a “suspected but unknown projectile,” though all crew members were confirmed safe. The ship subsequently sailed towards safe anchorage with minor damage.
In a separate incident occurring minutes later, the Marshall Islands-flagged bulk carrier Star Gwyneth was hit by an unknown projectile about 50 nautical miles northwest of Dubai, sustaining hull damage. No injuries or pollution were reported.
UKMTO has urged vessels transiting the area to maintain heightened vigilance and promptly report any suspicious activity as investigations continue.
OOCL Sunflower Loses 57 Containers in North Pacific Storm
The containership OOCL Sunflower lost approximately 57 containers overboard while navigating south of the Aleutian Island Chain in the North Pacific Ocean on 3 March, in conditions described as extreme.
The vessel, which had departed Kaohsiung, Taiwan, on 23 February, encountered violent seas that caused containers to go overboard while others on deck shifted or sustained damage. Rough conditions prevented the crew from carrying out a full damage assessment at sea. A comprehensive inspection was scheduled upon the ship’s arrival at Long Beach, United States, on 12 March.
Built in 2025 and sailing under the Hong Kong flag, the OOCL Sunflower measures nearly 367 metres in length and carries a capacity of 16,828 TEU.
Bulk Carrier Grounded in Çanakkale Strait, Later Refloated
The Panamanian-flagged bulk carrier Nota App ran aground in Turkey’s Çanakkale Strait on 11 March after suffering engine failure during a turning manoeuvre. The vessel, carrying a grain cargo from Russia to Egypt, was successfully refloated by Turkish rescue teams without casualties or pollution.
Three tugboats — Kurtarma 21, Kurtarma 4, and Kurtarma 15 — along with the rescue boat KEGM-8 were deployed by Turkey’s General Directorate of Coastal Safety. Divers also conducted an underwater inspection before the vessel was escorted to Karanlık Liman Anchorage for further examination.
Iranian Forces Attack Two Fuel Tankers in Iraqi Waters
Two fuel tankers were set ablaze after reportedly being struck by Iranian explosive-laden boats in Iraqi territorial waters in the early hours of 12 March, amid the continuing regional conflict involving Iran, the United States, and Israel.
The vessels attacked were the Safesea Vishnu, registered in the Marshall Islands, and the Zefyros, registered in Malta. Iraq’s State Oil Marketing Company confirmed the identities of both ships. The Zefyros was reported to have been loaded with condensate from the Basra Gas Company when it came under attack in the ship-to-ship transfer zone within Iraqi waters.
Twenty-five crew members from both vessels were rescued, while search operations for remaining crew continued. The body of one crew member was recovered from the water.
In response to the attacks, Iraqi oil ports were shut down, though cargo ports remained operational.
Drone Strike Sets Fuel Tanks Ablaze at Port of Salalah
Fuel storage tanks at Oman’s Port of Salalah were set on fire on 11 March following a drone attack attributed to Iranian forces. Several terminals were temporarily closed, though merchant vessels remained docked at the port. Omani authorities reported no casualties among port workers or residents and indicated that countermeasures were being deployed.
The Salalah strike marks a significant escalation, extending the theatre of conflict beyond direct Iran-Israel-US exchanges to threatening Gulf energy storage infrastructure and critical maritime trade corridors.
Nigeria Watch: What These Incidents Mean for Nigerian Shipping Stakeholders
The concentrated cluster of incidents across the Gulf of Oman, Iraqi territorial waters, and the UAE coastline carries direct implications for Nigeria’s maritime sector.
For Nigerian shipowners and vessel operators, the attacks on the Safesea Vishnu and Zefyros — both in what should have been a controlled ship-to-ship transfer zone — are a sobering reminder that even regulated loading operations in contested waters can become targets. War risk premiums for Gulf transits are almost certain to rise in the weeks ahead, with knock-on effects for freight rates on Middle East-origin refined products arriving at Nigerian ports.
Crude oil and petroleum product traders supplying the Dangote Refinery and other downstream operators should note that the shutdown of Iraqi oil ports, even temporarily, tightens regional supply dynamics and can feed into international crude price volatility. Nigeria, as a net importer of refined petroleum despite its upstream endowment, remains acutely exposed to such fluctuations.
The drone strike on Port of Salalah is equally significant: Salalah is a key transshipment hub on the Asia-Europe-West Africa corridor. Any sustained disruption there would extend voyage durations and increase the cost of cargo flows to West African ports, including Apapa and Tin Can Island.
For NIMASA and the Nigerian Navy, the proliferation of drone-and-projectile maritime attacks across the Gulf underlines the urgency of developing comparable detection and deterrence capabilities in Nigeria’s own offshore zone. The Gulf of Guinea remains a different threat environment, but the evolution of asymmetric maritime warfare is a lesson that no maritime administration can afford to ignore.
Waterways News Maritime Safety Desk
FIVE DEAD, 41 MISSING AS FIRE GUTS INDONESIAN FERRY CARRYING 271
By Raymond Gold | Waterways News
At least five people are dead and 41 others remain missing after a passenger ferry caught fire off Indonesia’s Madura Island on Sunday, triggering a major multi-agency search and rescue operation involving naval and civilian vessels.
The Mutiara Sentosa 2, sailing the roughly 40-hour Surabaya to Makassar route with 271 people on board, including 232 passengers and 39 crew members, caught fire between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. local time in waters off Sumenep regency, Indonesia’s National Search and Rescue Agency said. The vessel was also reportedly carrying 181 vehicles, mostly trucks, and an excavator.
About an hour after the blaze started, ferry operator PT Atosim Lampung Pelayaran alerted the Surabaya Search and Rescue Office, after the vessel’s captain radioed a distress report saying the ship was ablaze near the northern tip of Madura Island. Contact with the vessel was then lost.
By 9:45 a.m., rescuers had pinpointed the ferry’s location, roughly 19 nautical miles north of Buruan Sapudi Island, after reaching the nearby cargo ship Meratus Project 3. That vessel, however, could not approach the burning ferry closely because it was carrying a flammable load. A tugboat and another passing vessel became the first responders, beginning evacuations shortly before 10 a.m., before more ships joined the operation.
By Sunday afternoon, several nearby vessels had rescued 225 passengers and crew and recovered five bodies, with 41 people still unaccounted for. Basarnas dispatched a rescue vessel from Surabaya, though officials estimated a six-hour transit time to the scene, and a rigid inflatable boat sent from the Sumenep rescue post was forced to turn back due to rough seas and high waves. An Indonesian naval warship has since joined the search.
The cause of the fire has not been established and remains under investigation. It is the second major Indonesian maritime distress incident in as many months. Last month, rescuers searched for survivors after the KM Nurul Salsa suffered engine failure and sank, with five survivors, including a seven-year-old girl, recovered days later.
NIGERIA WATCH
Indonesia’s tragedy off Madura should sound familiar to anyone tracking Nigeria’s own inland and coastal waterways. Strip away the geography and the pattern is the same one that recurs on the Niger, the Benue and the Niger Delta creeks every rainy season. Overloaded or ill-equipped vessels, delayed distress reporting, and rescue assets that arrive too late or cannot reach the casualty at all.
The detail that should trouble Nigerian regulators most is the nearby cargo ship that could not assist the burning ferry because it was itself carrying flammable cargo. This is a reminder that firefighting capability, not just headcount, is the real test of vessel safety. NIMASA and NIWA have made real strides on the Seafarer Discharge Book digitization and the CVFF portal, but neither agency has articulated a clear standard for onboard fire-suppression systems on domestic ferries, particularly those plying the country’s inland waterways that operators like WABOTAN and ATBOWATON know well.
There is also a lesson for NIWA and LASWA in the response timeline. Indonesian rescuers, despite dispatching a navy warship and multiple agency assets, still needed roughly six hours to reach the vessel, and one rescue boat had to turn back in rough seas. Nigeria’s own record on Benue and Niger Delta boat accidents shows the same gap between a distress call and an effective response, a gap that NIWA’s enforcement push and the LASWA-Interferry Ferry Safety Development Programme are meant to close, but which will keep costing lives until vessel-side fire and lifesaving equipment compliance is treated with the same urgency as overloading and life-jacket enforcement.
Maritime Security and Safety
HORMUZ SHADOW FLEET: HOW A WAR-ZONE WORKAROUND IS QUIETLY KEEPING THE WORLD’S OIL MARKET ALIVE
HORMUZ SHADOW FLEET: HOW A WAR-ZONE WORKAROUND IS QUIETLY KEEPING THE WORLD’S OIL MARKET ALIVE
By Oghenewoke Osaweren | Waterways News
Beneath the surface calm of a fragile Middle East ceasefire, a covert maritime operation is doing what diplomacy has not been able to do. It is keeping oil flowing out of the world’s most contested waterway. Tankers with their transponders deliberately switched off are meeting far offshore, transferring millions of barrels ship-to-ship, and disappearing back into commercial shipping lanes before regulators, insurers, or belligerents can react.
This is not a new tactic. It is the same “dark fleet” playbook sanctioned Iranian, Russian, and Venezuelan crude have relied on for years. What has changed is who is now using it, and why a legitimate, US-escorted oil trade has been forced to borrow the tradecraft of sanctions evasion just to survive.
THE NUMBERS TELL A STORY OF FRAGILE NORMALITY
Satellite imagery over the Omani port of Sohar recorded at least seven tanker-pair transfers in a single day this week, several involving supertanker-class vessels capable of moving a combined 8 million barrels. Two weeks earlier, at the height of renewed US-Iran hostilities, that same stretch of water saw only two such transfers. The swing illustrates how tightly oil-market stability in 2026 is now tethered not to production levels, but to a handful of shipowners’ daily risk calculus.
Even with the rebound, flows remain a fraction of the roughly 20 million barrels a day that once transited the Strait of Hormuz before the war. US officials now put total Gulf exit volumes at around 13 million barrels daily, split roughly evenly between the strait itself and bypass pipelines built precisely to reduce dependence on Hormuz. American forces say they have personally escorted close to 500 million barrels out of the strait since May, a scale of military involvement in commercial shipping rarely seen outside declared war.
WHAT THIS MEANS BEYOND THE GULF
For Nigeria and other non-Gulf producers, a Hormuz shuttle trade that works, however imperfectly, is a double-edged development. It has so far kept a full-blown price shock at bay, with Brent oscillating between $80 and $100 rather than spiking uncontrollably, which shields Nigeria’s import-heavy fuel supply chain and naira-denominated energy costs from the worst-case scenario. But it also means Gulf producers are adapting fast enough to defend their market share even under bombardment, a resilience that could blunt any window Nigerian and West African crude grades might otherwise have gained as buyers hedged away from Hormuz-dependent barrels.
There is also a governance dimension worth flagging for Nigerian maritime observers. The same AIS-dark, ship-to-ship transfer tactics now legitimising emergency oil flows out of the Gulf are structurally identical to the techniques long used for illegal bunkering and crude theft in the Niger Delta and Gulf of Guinea. When a G7 navy escorts and effectively normalises transponder-dark transfers as sound commercial practice under conflict conditions, it complicates the international case for treating the same behaviour as inherently criminal in West African waters, an inconsistency Nigerian regulators and NIMASA may eventually have to reckon with.
A MARKET RUNNING ON DELAYED CARGOES, NOT CONFIDENCE
Perhaps the clearest sign of how strained the system remains: buyers of Emirati crude, including cargoes tied to ADNOC tenders, are only now receiving shipments that were due weeks ago, some having incurred demurrage costs on ships hired to collect oil that never showed up on schedule. ADNOC’s shipping unit has itself had to book a tanker for a Sohar ship-to-ship pickup, effectively routing its own state oil company’s cargo through the same shadow logistics used to dodge attacks.
The picture that emerges is not one of a market that has stabilised, but of a market that has adapted to instability, one satellite pass at a time.
Maritime Security and Safety
Search Continues for 17 Missing as Vietnamese Cargo Vessel Sinks in South China Sea
Search Continues for 17 Missing as Vietnamese Cargo Vessel Sinks in South China Sea
Rescuers are still combing waters near a contested reef system in the South China Sea after a Vietnamese-flagged cargo vessel went down over the weekend, leaving 17 crew members unaccounted for.
Of the 62 people who were aboard the vessel, the Khoi Nguyen 18, when it ran into difficulty, 45 have so far been pulled to safety, Vietnamese officials confirmed.
According to Chinese state media, the roughly 70-metre freighter got into trouble close to Yongshu Reef, also called Fiery Cross Reef, off China’s Hainan province. A Chinese rescue vessel, the Nanhai Jiu 115, first picked up what appeared to be a distress flare from the stricken ship on Saturday evening, shortly before 6:30pm local time.
The search-and-rescue effort has drawn in a sizeable multinational response: six Chinese vessels, a rescue helicopter, and a Vietnamese ship have all joined the operation, state news agency Xinhua reported.
A flashpoint waterway
The sinking adds to safety concerns in one of the world’s most disputed maritime zones. China claims sovereignty over the vast majority of the South China Sea — a position an international tribunal rejected in a landmark 2016 ruling brought by the Philippines.
Among the most contentious areas are the Spratly Islands (known in China as the Nansha Islands), where Beijing has built airstrips and fortified artificial islands. China’s claims overlap with those of Vietnam, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, and Taiwan, making the region a persistent source of regional friction and, as this incident shows, a challenging one for maritime emergency response.
Search efforts were ongoing at the time of filing.
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