# [Mike Randolph — M Raige](https://mikerandolph211012.substack.com/)

# The Voyage Nobody Will Book (4 - Oil)

### On the Strait of Hormuz, the return-leg problem, and why reopening a gate is not the same as rebuilding a trade

[**Mike Randolph — M Raige**](https://substack.com/@mikerandolph211012)

**June 12, 2026**
> **Mike:** We’re working on a series of posts on observing. This afternoon I got to wondering about the Iran/US situation — after it opens, who’s going to go back? Working with the machine, this is what came out.

There is a question the coverage of the Strait of Hormuz keeps walking past. Everyone is counting the ships trying to get *out*. Almost no one is asking who will sail back *in* to pick up a new load — and that question, not the blockade, is where the trade actually breaks.

As of now, June 12, 2026, a US–Iran framework deal is reportedly finalized, signing expected within days. On paper it lifts the blockade Trump announced ending on May 29 and reopens the waterway. Iran’s foreign minister says the strait “will not return to the pre-war era.” That phrase is the whole problem in seven words. A reopened gate is not an open market.

How open is it? PortWatch logged two transits on June 7 against a baseline of 94 a day — the strait running near 5% of normal. And the backlog isn’t draining; it grew during the partial reopenings. By May 6, General Dan Caine confirmed 22,500 mariners trapped on more than 1,550 vessels in and around the strait, a near-doubling that happened *during* the ceasefire. Every partial opening pulled more ships toward the chokepoint than it cleared.

The reason is that a vessel now clears three locks at once where before it cleared none: Iran’s discretionary permission, the war-risk insurer’s price, and sanctions exposure — paying Iran’s transit fee can itself breach sanctions. The population of ships that can make the passage is no longer the population that sailed before the war.

Now the throughline. Getting *out* is forced by sunk cost: the hull and cargo are already trapped, so owners eat almost any price to recover them. Getting *back in* for a fresh load is a clean commercial decision with no sunk cost compelling it — and no rational operator makes it. Here is why, and it is the part the coverage misses.

A fixed-term deal does not reduce the tail risk. It *schedules* it. A laden supertanker voyage out to a Gulf terminal, through loading and queuing, and back consumes a large fraction of a 60-day window — so you know the gate-holder’s discretion returns before your return voyage has paid for itself. You are not buying 60 days of safety. You are buying a guarantee that his leverage comes back on day 61, with your ship on the wrong side of it. Steaming a high-value asset into that position, on that clock, is selling a put on your own hull for a freight rate.

And the discretion is real, not theoretical. The April reopening lasted exactly one day — Iran declared the strait open on April 17, the IRGC reversed it on April 18. The only demonstrated way out has been sovereign-to-sovereign: Iran told Malaysia it would release its seven ships “one by one,” after the prime minister called Iran’s president directly. That is not a shipping market. It is a hostage negotiation with paperwork, and there are not 1,550 such negotiations available.

Even that understates it, because the signature reaches none of it. Crews are already gone — the International Transport Workers’ Federation reports seafarers unpaid eight to eleven months, and crews threatened with “serious consequences” for refusing to sail to Iran. You cannot premium your way past a crew that will not board.

So the strait can read “open” while new-cargo voyages stay near zero. What would actually flip it is not the signature but the *term*: a guarantee long enough to pay for a round trip with buffer — six months, not sixty days. Watch the term length, not the ceremony. The signing is theater. The gate-holder’s clock is the system, and until it runs longer than a voyage, the most important trip in global energy is the one nobody will book.