Maritime Briefing of 14 September 2026

inside the Bab el-Mandeb after government forces withdrew from it on Friday. Perim, also known as Mayun, divides the narrowest part of the strait into two navigation channels; Dhubab lies directly opposite on the mainland. Presidential Leadership Council chairman Rashad al-Alimi said the offensive was increasingly directed at Bab el-Mandeb and the western coast, and the National Defence Council acknowledged a repositioning of forces there. Houthi negotiator Mohammed Abdulsalam said navigation and international trade in the Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb remained safe and regular, and the group's Humanitarian Operations Coordination Center said the Red Sea stays open to all shipping companies except Saudi vessels. Around 8.1m barrels a day of crude and petroleum liquids passed through Bab el-Mandeb in the second quarter of 2026, up from 5.4m bpd in the fourth quarter of 2025, and Maersk's MECL service resumed transits of the strait and the Suez Canal on 9 September, cutting eight days against the Cape routing.

, saying the operation killed three people on what it described as an established narco-trafficking route. Pentagon figures put the toll of the campaign against suspected trafficking boats at more than 200. In recent weeks joint US and Ecuadorian patrols have removed crews from at least six boats before sinking them. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, speaking in Quito, said decisions were taken case by case depending on the threat a vessel posed, its location and local law, and announced the designation of the Ecuadorian gang Los Tiguerones as a terrorist organisation.

over the cable damage in the Gulf of Finland on 31 December 2025. Captain Andrei Maksimenko and the ship's boatswain face charges of aggravated sabotage and aggravated interference with telecommunications, carrying up to two and a half years in prison. Their ship, the 132-metre Fitburg, renamed Finex in March, was Turkish-owned and registered in St Vincent and the Grenadines. Eight cables and pipelines were damaged, and anchor drag marks run for at least 130 kilometres. Six hearing days are scheduled with two more in reserve. The defence says the crew believed the anchor was secure and points to bad weather and ice on deck.

in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, paying $1.75m between them and taking four years of probation. Between June 2024 and January 2025 senior engineers aboard the 2,578 TEU MSC Samira III had oily bilge water pumped into the sewage holding tank and discharged overboard around the oily water separator, and ran fresh water through the oil content monitor to defeat it. False oil record books were presented at Philadelphia, where Coast Guard inspections on 9 and 27 January 2025 led to detentions of three and thirteen days. Second engineer Mikhail Tsurikov pleaded guilty separately. US Attorney David Metcalf said the companies "repeatedly cut corners and covered it up, befouling the marine environment."

Special Provision 188 of the dangerous goods code exempts smaller batteries when testing, packaging and capacity criteria are met, but sets no limit on how many exempt cells may be consolidated in one box: a container of roughly 4,200 laptops holds about 416 kWh, the equivalent of three or four electric cars, with no dangerous goods documentation and no placarding. Above a threshold, shipments would have to be declared. Council president and chief executive Joe Kramek said the exemption "was intended to simplify the transport of individual devices with small batteries, not to make entire container loads invisible." Five governments and a coalition of industry bodies co-sponsored the submission, which governments consider at the Sub-Committee on Carriage of Cargoes and Containers in London from 14 to 18 September. Global lithium-ion battery deployment in 2025 was six times the 2020 level and demand is expected to double by 2030; Allianz counts a container ship fire every 17 days.

The reduction from 14.63 metres to 14.48 metres was first moved from 1 September to 1 October and has now been postponed indefinitely, while transit slots carry the adjustment instead: Panamax lock bookings dropped to nine a day on 3 September and total daily transits fall to 23 on 15 September. Gatun Lake has held at about 84 feet after dipping below that at the end of August, with forecasts pointing to a slight rise into October before the decline resumes. Rainfall between April and August ran 35.8% below the historical average.

, with weekly calls by ships of more than 23,000 TEU from September. The loop links Port Klang, Singapore, Laem Chabang, Vung Tau and Busan with Long Beach and Oakland, and would set a new size benchmark for the transpacific trade in Southern California. Total Terminals International recently handled about 41,000 vessel lifts in a single week.

Over nine months the trailing suction hopper dredger Galileo Galilei deepened the access channel to the port of Itapoá from 14 to 16 metres and pumped seven million cubic metres of the dredged sand ashore, creating nine kilometres of beach between 40 and 150 metres wide and five kilometres of dunes planted with native vegetation.

at the Baltyk 2 and Baltyk 3 offshore wind farms off Poland. The ship loaded nearly 45,000 tonnes of rock in Norway, which the contractor says is the largest single cargo carried by a vessel of this type, and is installing it over the export cables running to the Polish mainland through an inclined fallpipe. The 1.44 GW project, developed by Equinor and Polenergia and lying 37 and 22 kilometres off Ustka and Leba, will have 100 Siemens Gamesa SG 14-236 DD turbines of 14.4 MW each, with first power due in 2027 and full commissioning in 2028.

The June 2026 discovery on Block 17, where the company holds a 38% operated interest, will be developed through spare capacity on the Pazflor FPSO and should add about 6,000 barrels a day. The company also agreed with the national agency ANPG to take 40% operated interests in exploration blocks 17/25 and 32/21 in the Lower Congo basin, alongside ExxonMobil with 40% and Sonangol with 20%, both blocks sitting near existing infrastructure that future discoveries could be tied back to.

for the West Hub Tails project on Block 15/06 off Angola. The work moves production from the Sangos, Ochigufu, Mpungi and Vandumbu fields off the ageing Ngoma FPSO, which has been on station since 2014, onto the 120,000 barrel a day Agogo FPSO. TechnipFMC holds the associated flexible pipe and riser package, valued at between $75m and $250m. Azule is an equally owned joint venture of Eni and BP.

Westwood Global Energy head of offshore energy services Thom Payne told the Offshore Support Journal Conference Asia that the average OSV is now 16 years old and that on the current orderbook only 17% of the fleet will be under 15 years old by 2030, the threshold many charterers apply. There are 178 newbuildings on order worldwide, about 6% of the existing fleet, and softening anchor-handler and platform supply rates since 2025 have weighed on contracting sentiment even as demand grows.

for the South American and West African deepwater markets, issuing a basic design review covering the front-end engineering design across hull, topsides and mooring, along with approval in principle against the SUSTAIN-2 notation and a statement of fact for the yard's project sustainability execution plan.

The product and crude carrier concept, shown at SMM 2026 and assessed against the class rules of July 2026 and the IACS common structural rules for oil tankers, builds conversion readiness into the original design to reduce retrofit complexity later.

, developed with China Merchants' Yangzhou Dingheng yard for trades constrained by port draft, short hauls and high-frequency turnarounds.

Hong Kong's first Chief Executive after 1997 spent his earlier career in shipping: a marine engineering graduate of the University of Liverpool, he took over Orient Overseas from his father C.Y. Tung in 1982 and led it for 14 years, through a restructuring of roughly $2.7bn of group debt in the mid-1980s that nearly ended the company, and out the other side as a container line. His brother Tung Chee-chen succeeded him in 1996, and COSCO SHIPPING Holdings acquired OOIL in 2018.