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On the afternoon of August 20, a product tanker transiting west through the Gulf of Aden broadcast a distress call on VHF Channel 16 reporting that an unauthorized vessel was approaching. Her AIS then transmitted a message reading PIRATE ONBOARD HELP. Shortly afterward she altered course toward Somalia. Six armed men had boarded the 32,200 dwt Sibu 1, IMO 9204776, roughly 136 nautical miles east of Al Mukalla, Yemen. Twenty crew were aboard. Sixteen Indians, one Syrian, one S

[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

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