Hormuz, Red Sea and Black Sea shipping intelligence from a broking desk: the DARKCON Gulf tanker index, chokepoint status, freight rates, fixtures, grain afloat and grain tenders.

The number

DARKCON is the share of screened Gulf tankers that stopped broadcasting AIS in the last 24 hours, divided by the share of other ships that did the same on the identical test, so ordinary reception dropout cancels out. What's left is ships choosing to go dark. Five levels, read like DEFCON: 1 is BLACKOUT, the worst; 5 is ALL LIGHTS BURNING. The light board beside it shows the count, one dot per tanker, never the names. The strip under the ladder is the last thirty nights, one bar each, the log's events pinned above the night they happened; this browser keeps every night it reads, and the desk notebook can backfill the rest. THE CARD button draws the number as a 1200×630 picture for the channel, shared where the browser has a share sheet and downloaded everywhere else; the same picture, saved as og.png beside the page, is what a shared link previews. DARKCON.JSON is the same numbers for machines.

The chokepoints

Each chokepoint is a flight. SHIPS is how many crossed on the latest published day, NORMAL the median of the year before Hormuz shut, February 2025 to February 2026, LOAD one against the other. For Suez, Bab el-Mandeb and the Cape that year already carried the Red Sea diversion, so their LOAD reads high and their remarks say so. DETOUR is what avoiding the chokepoint costs in days. WAR RISK is the hull premium as a multiple of the pre-war rate, where one is quoted. The status flap is set by the count; Bab el-Mandeb is set by hand while ships are being hit. Remarks scroll; hover to hold one. WHO NEEDS IT, under each row, is the trades that depend on that gate, so a flap change reads straight into a market. Under that, the last fourteen published days as bars against NORMAL, and the day the flap last changed. The Turkish Straits row reads PortWatch's own Bosporus count directly, its NORMAL the median of the same pre-crisis year the other rows use.

The seal

LIVE and a time: your browser reached the feeds just now, and asks again every 30 minutes while the tab is open. AS OF 28 SEP: the numbers the page shipped with. FEED UNREACHED, in amber: no answer within nine seconds, so the last numbers stay and say so. The odds carry their own seal. Freight prints are dated one by one. THE 0600Z BRIEF is this page on one sheet, stamped with the time it was made: print it, or copy it as text for the channel. Nothing here is advice.

The desk

The desk's blocks are typed by hand, not fed, and each carries the date it was written. THE MED & BLACK SEA is the desk's read by segment. THE COASTER BOARD is what small tonnage earns and what a tonne costs on the main routes: the delivery-TBS earnings, the coaster route prints and the open tonnage come from the Monday Coaster Freight Index, the round-voyage earnings and the HANDY TO SUPRAMAX prints from the Friday assessments, each block dated with its own print. TCE is the daily time-charter equivalent, DWCC the cargo a ship carries, CVB Constanta, Varna and Burgas, POC the Ukrainian deep-sea ports, TBS the Turkish Black Sea delivery basis, RV a round voyage with the way back empty. THE GRAIN AFLOAT counts every grain cargo that has left a Black Sea port and not yet arrived, from GrainFlow, which runs a week behind; the desk groups its declared destinations by the chokepoint each one needs. THE VALUES is what a 30,000-tonner is worth at ten and twenty years old, in US$ millions. THE FIXTURE WIRE is what was done, bid or failed, one line each, dated one by one: search any word on a line, and chart one route across every print. THE SCORECARD grades the desk's own calls against the next weekly print, hit or miss, and shows every miss. RATE THE STEM runs the house voyage model over any lane in the basin: pick the ports, the ship and the stem, type a freight and read the daily earning, or type the earning you need and read the freight, with the market's latest print on that lane beside it. Its amber line prices the Danube lanes at the index's fifteen days of waiting, so the wait reads as dollars a day. Ports marked ~ are the desk's estimates until confirmed, and every figure that uses one says so. The TANKER tab prices liquid stems from a 5,000-tonner to a Suezmax on the same table: vegoil, CPP, DPP, chemicals and UAN, in dollars a tonne, lumpsum or Worldscale, with hours in port, heating, cleaning and the ballast leg back; a Worldscale flat lives in the notebook and never prints. THE TENDER BOARD is what the state buyers bought, walked away from or still ask for, typed from the wires as reported: tonnes, C&F price, shipment window, discharge ports, and the gate a Black Sea cargo would need, with every window laid on a calendar. THE TAPE tab charts every C&F by date, one line per buyer. Under each priced line the board prints the implied freight, C&F less FOB: the desk's typed FOB where there is one, otherwise the index's indicative Russian wheat FOB, and it says which. Where the desk has named the nearest freight print, the line adds FOB plus that print and the gap the C&F leaves over it; where the house model prices the ship, the earning at the implied freight prints too. THE SEAL beside the clock is the desk's hit rate on the week's graded calls. The five tiles at the top are the page's answers, and everything beneath them is open on the page; a heading folds its section to one line, and this browser remembers which you folded. When you come back, an amber pill in the header counts what changed since your last visit and opens the list; that memory lives in this browser and nowhere else.