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A tug is assisting a loaded barge into a berth. The tug’s master misjudges the approach, the barge strikes the dock, and there is damage to the barge, the dock, and the cargo. Who pays depends almost entirely on two things. Which contract form governs, and which side of the Atlantic you are on. International towage has settled on a risk allocation that the United States Supreme Court declared void as a matter of public policy in 1955 and has never retreated from. That decisio

On 29 September, an operation in Somali waters freed the remaining crew of the hijacked vessel Honour 25. Five seafarers were killed during the rescue. Several others were seriously injured. The Honour 25 was one of three vessels released that week. Together with the Seamull and the Eureka, 44 seafarers came out of captivity that had run for months. Their governments are now working with the shipowners and relevant authorities on repatriation. Twenty-two seafarers remain aboa

On 10 November 2025, the United States and China each suspended the port fee regimes they had imposed on one another's shipping. The suspension runs twelve months. It expires on 10 November 2026, which is roughly five weeks from now, and there is no guarantee it will be renewed. Most charter parties fixed since then have been written as though the fees do not exist, because at the moment of fixing they did not. If the measures resume, those contracts will be silent on a charg

A counterparty screens clean. The name returns no hits on the Specially Designated Nationals list, the company is registered in a jurisdiction with no sanctions program against it, and the vessel it owns has never appeared on a designation notice. None of that tells you the company is not sanctioned. Under the ownership rules applied by the United States, the European Union, and the United Kingdom, an entity can be subject to an asset freeze without ever being named, purely b

On August 21 and August 24, a specialized team of Coast Guard law enforcement officers, a vessel inspector, Coast Guard cyber protection personnel, and FBI cyber operators boarded two foreign-flagged oil tankers in the Gulf of Mexico. The joint statement said the boardings were designed to ensure the integrity of each vessel's operational and information technology systems following indications that their networks had been compromised by foreign cyber actors. One of the vesse

The bill of lading is the most important document in international trade and one of the few that does three unrelated jobs at once. It is a receipt for goods, evidence of the contract of carriage, and a document of title that can be bought, sold, and pledged while the cargo is still at sea. Most of the disputes that arise around it come from confusing those functions or from treating the third one as a formality. A shipper who focuses on the description of goods, a carrier wh

On September 9, a Federal Maritime Commission administrative law judge rejected Peloton Interactive's claim against Flexport in full. The company had sought $33.7 million in detention, demurrage, and storage charges accumulated during the pandemic-era supply chain disruption. It recovered nothing. The breakdown of what was claimed is instructive. Roughly $13.8 million in demurrage, $16.2 million in equipment detention, and $3.7 million in yard and warehouse storage, across th

Most maritime companies in the United States are privately held. Family towing operations, regional barge lines, terminal companies, shipyards, forwarders, and single-vessel owners. No public shareholders, no securities filings, and frequently no formal board beyond the people who own the business. The common assumption in that setting is that directors and officers liability insurance is something public companies buy to satisfy investors. It is not. Private company leadersh

A tank barge on the Lower Mississippi carrying 30,000 barrels of product is, in insurance terms, a modest asset. The hull value is a fraction of a deepsea tanker. The crew is small. The trade is domestic and familiar. The pollution exposure attached to it is not modest, it is not limited to the value of the barge, and under a set of circumstances that are considerably easier to trigger than most operators assume, it is not limited at all. This article covers how the Oil Pollu

On Sunday August 23, the Persian Gulf Strait Authority published its first Non-Compliant Vessels list. Announced through the body's X account and hosted on its website, the list names vessels Iran says have violated its arrangements for transiting the Strait of Hormuz and warns that they face restrictions on future passages including fines, detention, seizure, or confiscation. Shipping companies, the statement said, must review the list before chartering in order to avoid pot

The International WorkBoat Show returns to the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans December 2-4. More than 1,000 exhibitors, upwards of 13,000 attendees, and the one US trade event where the inland, harbor towing, and offshore support segments all show up in the same building. Nord Young will be there. Not exhibiting this year, just walking the floor. The conference program has not been fully published yet, so this is a preview of the exhibit floor rather than a

[Image from Wikimedia Commons, from User Unukorno, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0] On January 9, 2025, a 152,000 dwt crude tanker suffered a total blackout in the Baltic Sea. She drifted unmanned in heavy seas, lost all maneuverability, and came into German territorial waters off the island of Rügen. German authorities towed her to an anchorage off Sassnitz to prevent a spill. She is still there. The Eventin has now been at anchor off a German resort island for more than ni

On the weekend of August 16, the bunkering vessel Haigang Zhiyuan delivered 8,016 metric tonnes of domestically produced green methanol to the dual-fuel container ship CMA CGM Osmium at Yangshan Port in Shanghai. Shanghai Customs supervised the operation. It is the largest single green methanol bunkering on record. The operation brought together Shanghai Electric, Shanghai International Port Group, and CMA CGM, with the fuel supplied principally from Shanghai Electric's Taona

[Chattogram Coastal Road Photo by Samina Khondkar - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=148921351] On the morning of August 14, workers at the Ferdous Steel yard in Sitakunda, Bangladesh, were cutting an opening in the bottom of a ballast tank aboard a beached LNG carrier. Hydrogen sulphide escaped. Two men died where they stood. Seven more died in hospital. Among the dead was Motiur Rahaman, aged 17. Another was Abdul Alim Sujon, a safety

Two years after Houthi attacks pushed the container trades around the Cape of Good Hope, the largest carriers are transiting the Red Sea again. MSC sent seven boxships through the Suez Canal this month. Maersk returned its MECL service to the trans-Suez route in August, having made its first tentative transit in December. CMA CGM has been running services through the corridor since late last year. What is striking is not that the return is happening. It is how it is happening

Every towing vessel subject to Subchapter M holds a Certificate of Inspection, and every COI was obtained through one of two routes. The Coast Guard issues the certificate either way. What differs is who verifies compliance, how often, and on whose schedule. Operators frequently treat this as a procedural detail settled once at the start of the phase-in and never revisited. It is not. The choice determines your annual cost structure, your exposure to scheduling risk, the amou

Speaking at a campaign event in Garden City, Long Island on August 14, President Trump told an audience of law enforcement officers that "after we finish defeating Iran, which is being very badly defeated, pretty soon I'll be declaring the Hormuz Strait a territory of the United States." He added, "Essentially, that's what it is. We have the blockade. No ships get through unless we want them to." Iran's Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi responded on X within hours. Th

An oil spill off the coast of Oman has spread across somewhere between 390 and 2,000 square kilometers, depending on whose satellite analysis you accept, and reached roughly 40 kilometers of mainland coastline near Ras Madrakah on August 12. The source is a half-sunk tanker called the Caroline Bezengi, aground in the Arabian Sea, leaking crude for approximately six weeks with no effective containment. The vessel is 81,085 gross tons. It has held no classification from an IACS

[Image: USCGC Munro (WMSL-755), the cutter that pursued the Bella 1 across the Atlantic] On August 7, 2026, a 47-year-old Georgian national named Avtandil Kalandadze was sentenced in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to ten months in federal prison. He will be deported when the term is served. The coverage framed it as a shadow fleet prosecution, which it is. What the coverage mostly did not say is that Kalandadze was not convicted of a sanctions offense. H

On July 19, 2024, a deckhand named among the five crew aboard the towing vessel Miss Peggy drowned in the galley of his own boat after it was struck from behind and rolled over in the Houston Ship Channel. Four of his shipmates got out. He did not. The National Transportation Safety Board released its investigation report on August 6, 2026. It runs 92 pages, and the finding at the center of it is one that every safety manager in the industry should read carefully, because it