CNN's weekly tally has ship crossings through Hormuz up 27 percent — 103 entering, 89 leaving — even with the American blockade running and Iran's strait authority still withholding permits. [1] Whether that number means recovery or something else depends on who counted the hulls.

UKMTO figures rest heavily on voluntary reports from ships' masters; commercial analytics firms like Kpler count differently, tracking transponder pings and publishing weekly Strait transit data. [2] Both methods leak. A master can simply not report. A tanker can go further and switch off AIS entirely — Reuters documented three oil and LNG carriers exiting Hormuz with their transponders dark. [3]

Then there is the routing question. Kpler's own analysis had tanker traffic shifted almost entirely onto the Iranian side of the waterway, with the Omani route underused because war-risk pricing punishes it. [2] So a rising weekly count cannot distinguish normalized commerce from sanctioned tonnage moving darker and closer to shore. That is exactly the argument running through shipping X: southern-Omani routing on one side, evasion convoys on the other.

CENTCOM says the strait remains open to all traffic; Iran's permit regime says otherwise. [1] Between those claims sits a counting problem nobody has solved. Neither method sees everything; both see something. The honest reading treats 27 percent as evidence of motion, not a measure of trade.

-- THEO KAPLAN, San Francisco