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.
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
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.
Maritime Security and Safety
144 Dead or Missing as “Backway” Migrant Boat Drifts 25 Days off Mauritania
144 Dead or Missing as “Backway” Migrant Boat Drifts 25 Days off Mauritania
UNHCR Renews Warning Over Deadly Atlantic Route
By Raymond Gold | Waterways News
At least 144 people, most of them from The Gambia, have been confirmed dead or gone missing after a migrant boat that spent nearly 25 days drifting in the Atlantic Ocean was finally rescued off the coast of Mauritania, the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, has confirmed.
The vessel, a wooden pirogue that departed from Bafuloto in The Gambia with around 160 people on board, ran out of fuel far from shore and drifted helplessly for over three weeks before it was intercepted and towed into the Mauritanian port city of Nouadhibou on 18 July. Only 38 survivors were found alive, alongside the bodies of some of those who had perished. Mauritania’s Ministry of Fisheries put the number still unaccounted for at 122, with one body recovered separately.
Passengers on the stranded boat reportedly ran out of food and water within days and were forced to drink seawater to survive. Among the 38 survivors pulled from the vessel were two children who lost every member of their family during the croossing and are now recovering in hospital in Mauritania, according to UNHCR spokesperson Matt Saltmarsh, who briefed reporters in Geneva.
The Bafuloto boat was the deadliest of three separate disembarkations that Mauritanian authorities, UNHCR and humanitarian partners handled between 14 and 18 July, a week in which 387 people in total were brought safely ashore from vessels in distress. In a separate incident during the same window, a boat that had set out from neighbouring Senegal was intercepted with all 179 people on board rescued alive. A further person died aboard another vessel that disembarked on 14 July.
UNHCR described itself as “extremely saddened” by the deaths and again labelled the Atlantic route to Spain’s Canary Islands, roughly 1,677 kilometres from Bafuloto, “one of the world’s deadliest,” citing the extreme distances involved and the routine use of overcrowded, unseaworthy wooden boats never designed for open-ocean voyages of that length.
The tragedy fits into a grim and escalating pattern. According to the International Organization for Migration’s Missing Migrants Project, 1,214 people died or disappeared on the West Africa/Atlantic route to the Canary Islands in 2025 alone, out of nearly 8,000 migrant deaths recorded worldwide that year. IOM has also warned that the real toll on the Atlantic route is almost certainly far higher, since search-and-rescue information is increasingly restricted and many disappearances at sea are never verified or linked to any known incident.
The route has become deadlier even as arrival numbers have fallen. Mauritania, a key transit and departure point for the crossing, signed a migration-management partnership with the European Union and subsequently launched a crackdown on departures involving coastal patrols, document raids and mass expulsions, a campaign that has drawn criticism from neighbouring countries over alleged human rights violations. IOM notes that as border enforcement has tightened, migrants have increasingly been pushed toward longer, more dangerous, and more geographically dispersed departure points further down the West African coast, rather than being deterred from travelling altogether.
UNHCR has renewed its call for governments in the region and in Europe to expand access to education and legitimate livelihood opportunities as alternatives to the crossing, warning that enforcement alone will not stop people from attempting the journey as long as the underlying drivers of migration remain unaddressed.
Nigeria Watch: When “Japa” Meets the Backway. A Warning Nigeria’s Maritime and Water Transport Stakeholders Cannot Ignore
The Bafuloto tragedy did not happen in Nigerian waters, and its 144 dead and missing were overwhelmingly Gambian and other West African nationals rather than Nigerians. But for Nigeria’s maritime community, and for the ordinary Nigerians who increasingly frame irregular emigration through the lens of “Japa,” the incident is impossible to read as someone else’s story.
The Gambian “Backway” and the Nigerian “Japa” impulse are, at bottom, the same phenomenon wearing different national colours, a generation convinced that the only rational response to state failure is exit, by whatever means available. Nigeria’s version of “Japa” has, for now, expressed itself mainly through visa routes, student migration, and irregular land and sea journeys through the Sahara and Libya toward the Mediterranean rather than the Atlantic pirogue route favoured by Gambians, Senegalese and other coastal West Africans sailing for the Canary Islands. But the Atlantic route is not sealed off from Nigerians, and the underlying pressure which include youth unemployment, currency depreciation, insecurity, and a collapsing sense of opportunity at home.
This is where the maritime and blue economy governance conversation Waterways News covers every week intersects directly with a humanitarian catastrophe. NIMASA, NIWA and the Federal Ministry of Marine and Blue Economy under Minister Adegboyega Oyetola have spent this period building out a blue economy agenda anchored on the promise that Nigeria’s waters, properly harnessed, can generate legitimate livelihoods: fisheries, aquaculture, coastal tourism, cabotage shipping, and inland waterways transport. The Bafuloto disaster is a brutal illustration of what happens when that promise fails to materialise fast enough, and young people instead look at the same ocean and see not opportunity but an exit route worth risking their lives for.
There is also a sober lesson here for Nigeria’s own inland and coastal waterways safety conversation, one this publication has returned to repeatedly in the context of fatal boat capsizings on routes across different parts of the country. The Bafuloto boat failed for reasons that will sound uncomfortably familiar to anyone who has covered Nigerian boat mishaps: an unregulated wooden vessel, wildly overloaded beyond any safe capacity, undertaking a journey with no functioning safety net, no reliable fuel margin, and no search-and-rescue backstop until it was almost too late. Whether the vessel is crossing the Atlantic toward the Canary Islands or crossing the Lagos Lagoon toward Apapa, or from the Benue to the Niger rivers, the pattern of preventable waterways death, poor vessel standards, absent regulation, and desperate passengers absorbing risks that better-resourced systems would simply not allow, is the same.
For Nigeria’s seafarer and boat operator associations, including cooperative operators like WABOTAN and ATBOWATON or advocacy group like SWAAADO, that this publication engages closely, the episode is also a reminder that the maritime labour market genuinely on offer to irregular migrants in Europe is rarely the dignified opportunity the journey promises.
Undocumented migrants overwhelmingly end up in precarious, low-status, and often exploitative work, frequently work that mirrors the very maritime, artisanal and service-sector jobs Nigerians could be doing at home, but without the legal protection, wage security, or dignity that a properly regulated domestic blue economy could offer.
None of this argues against legal migration, which remains a legitimate and valuable pathway for Nigerian professionals, including trained seafarers seeking certification and berths abroad through proper channels. It argues for urgency on CVFF disbursement reaching genuine small operators rather than stalling in bureaucratic limbo; on NIMASA and NIWA’s safety regulation of inland and coastal vessels being enforced rather than merely announced; and on the blue economy’s job-creation promises translating into visible, bankable opportunities before another generation concludes that a 25-day gamble on an open boat to Europe is more rational than staying home.
The 144 lives lost off Mauritania were not Nigerian. But the conditions that put them on that boat, and the temptation that could just as easily put a young Nigerian on the next one, are not foreign to us at all.
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