All Articles

The International Group of P&I Clubs finalized its reinsurance arrangements for the 2026/27 policy year, effective from noon on 20 February 2026. Four of the five vessel categories got a rate reduction. One did not. Fully cellular container ships went up 15 percent, to $1.0237 per gross ton. Persistent oil tankers fell 8 percent, dry cargo fell 5 percent, passenger vessels fell 8.5 percent, and clean tankers were held flat. For a container operator, that is a cost increase ar

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

Six months into the conflict, the marine insurance market has a number. David Osler, law and marine insurance editor at Lloyd's List, puts war risk claims arising from the fighting at roughly $2 billion across more than 70 filings. On his assessment it is exceeded, over the past decade, only by the payouts arising from the containership that brought down the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore in 2024. The International Maritime Organization has recorded more than 72 attack

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

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

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

For five months the Hormuz crisis has been a tanker story. Crude carriers hit, product tankers rerouted, VLCCs priced out of transits they had made routinely for decades. LNG featured in the coverage mostly as a supply statistic, a fifth of global flows sitting behind a closed strait. That changed over the last week of July. Two vessels from the same fleet were struck in two different seas in four days, one of them left without propulsion in the middle of the Strait of Hormuz

For five months, the working assumption across the industry has been that the Strait of Hormuz crisis, however severe, was a single-chokepoint problem with a single-chokepoint solution. Cargo could move west. Saudi crude could reach the Red Sea overland and load at Yanbu. The Cape route was expensive and slow but it existed. Every contingency plan drafted since February rested on the premise that one door was closed and another remained open. As of last Monday, that premise n

There are weeks in the shipping calendar that change how the industry thinks about risk. This is one of them. In the space of seventy-two hours, the world's two most strategically significant maritime conflict zones, Hormuz and the Black Sea, both escalated sharply, independently, simultaneously, and with consequences that are still unfolding as of today, July 20, 2026. In the Persian Gulf, the ceasefire framework that briefly stabilized the Strait of Hormuz in June has colla

Every year, Allianz Commercial publishes its Safety and Shipping Review, a data-driven analysis of global shipping loss trends, incident causes, and emerging risk themes drawn from claim data, industry reporting, and their own underwriting experience. This year's edition landed at a moment when the industry is navigating a degree of geopolitical disruption not seen in decades, and the report reflects that context directly. What it also reflects, however, is a more complex and

Insurance Policies Breakdown Insurance is one of those things most people think about only when something goes wrong. By then, the question is no longer what coverage costs, it's whether you have the right kind. This is a straightforward breakdown of what Nord Young offers across both marine and commercial lines, what each coverage type actually does, and why it matters to the businesses we work with. We work with clients on both sides of the industry divide. Whether you're

There are moments in maritime history that redefine how the industry operates, sometimes just for a season, sometimes for years. We are living through one of them right now. As of today, March 26, 2026, the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passage between Iran and Oman through which roughly 20 percent of the world's seaborne oil and global LNG once flowed freely, is effectively closed to commercial shipping. This post is an attempt to lay out what happened, where things stand, an