The Ships and the Line

The finding Before the disruption the Strait of Hormuz ran at about 91 transit calls a day, the mean over the trailing year to 28 February 2026. The line that decides the market is a 7-day average of 60, roughly two thirds of that baseline. The contract does not ask for a full recovery. It asks for two thirds of one. Traffic collapsed on 1 March 2026, and the 7-day average fell through the line in early March and has not returned. Its best week in the entire disruption peaked at 34 (30 June), the latest reading is 12 (19 July), and the trough was 1 (14 March). The average has not reached 60 since 3 March, and no raw daily count has since the collapse. The line takes 420 transit calls in a week. The strait’s latest week carried 85. The Ships and the Line · Vera Research The gap, in ships The arithmetic of the line is the whole shape of the thing. A 7-day average of 60 means 420 transit calls inside a seven-day window. The best seven days since the collapse carried 237; the latest seven days carried 85. Whatever happened was specific to Hormuz. Over the same before-and-after windows the Malacca Strait ran at 0.93 of its own average and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait at 1.06, against Hormuz...