The maritime body that ships' masters report to has logged nothing new since 27 July, after 22 reports in the first 26 days of the month, and an empty log is not the same thing as an empty sea
The last entry on the Royal Navy's incident log is numbered 098-26 and dated 27 July. Below it sit 21 more, running back to the first of the month without a gap in the numbering. Above it there is nothing.
United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations is the centre merchant masters and company security officers report to when something happens to their ship. It numbers and dates every report, gives a position, and says in a paragraph what was described to it. When this desk read the list in a browser at about 10:45 on Thursday morning, it carried 22 reports, and none of them was dated later than 27 July.
That covers the three days in which the United States resumed strikes on Iran and Central Command said it had completed a heavy wave against dozens of Revolutionary Guard targets, and in which the Guard said it would punish the aggressor.
What the month before looked like
By this desk's count of the labels the page prints against each entry, the 22 break down as 13 attacks, four advisories, three reports of suspicious activity, one hijack and one illegal boarding.
The attacks cluster where the war is. Limah in Oman appears four times. Khasab, Kumzar, Qalhat and Dibba appear once each, and two entries name the Strait of Hormuz directly. On 11 July a container ship 9 nautical miles east of Oman sustained damage to its stern and caught fire, and the crew abandoned into a lifeboat before local authorities recovered them. On 19 July a vessel northwest of Kumzar was left adrift and burning. On 20 July, 8 nautical miles northeast of Limah, another crew abandoned ship into a lifeboat after an unknown projectile struck.
That is the last attack logged in the Hormuz approaches. It is ten days old.
The last attack logged anywhere is warning 095-26, on 22 July, where a tanker 70 nautical miles southwest of Al Shuqaiq in Saudi Arabia reported being struck and fighting a fire. Since then the list has recorded a splash near a tanker in the southern Red Sea, an interaction between a tanker and military forces in the Gulf of Oman, and a master who heard an explosion while transiting the southern Red Sea. Then nothing.
Why the silence proves less than it appears to
An empty log is not an empty sea, and there are three specific reasons to hold this loosely.
The first is the largest. This site reported on Thursday morning that tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has effectively halted. A waterway with far fewer ships in it produces far fewer reports from ships, and on that reading the quiet is a measure of absent traffic rather than absent hostility.
The second is structural. Reports reach UKMTO through the master or through military authorities, and the scheme is voluntary. A vessel that is not participating can be hit and leave no trace on this list.
The third is scope. UKMTO records what happens to merchant shipping. It has nothing to say about strikes on land, and its silence carries no information about them either way.
The thing actually worth watching
Used carefully the log still cuts both ways, and both are reportable. A logged incident is independent confirmation of a claim made elsewhere. An empty date against a claim of activity is a second document declining to corroborate it, which is worth a paragraph so long as the paragraph also says why an absence is not a refutation.
The shape to watch now is the order in which two things return. If incidents start appearing again as traffic returns to the strait, the last three days were about how few ships were there. If they start appearing before the traffic does, they were about something else.
