Roughly a quarter of the non-Iranian large oil tankers stranded inside the Persian Gulf when the Iran war began have now managed to leave, according to Bloomberg. The slow exit of these vessels is one of the clearest tanker-specific signals yet that some owners and charterers are still finding ways to move cargoes despite extreme war-risk conditions around the Strait of Hormuz.
For TankerMap, the key development is not a broad return to normal traffic but a selective reopening pattern. If trapped VLCCs and other large crude tankers are slipping out in small numbers, that points to uneven confidence across the fleet, with freight, insurance, routing and port-call decisions still being reshaped by security conditions. TankerMap tracks 4,022 tankers and 155 ports worldwide, and this kind of staggered release from the Gulf is an important live indicator for crude shipping, chokepoint risk and regional export flows.