The life-or-death decision Silke faces every day
Jenny Gross
From her office overlooking the Elbe River in Hamburg, Germany, Captain Silke Lehmköster wrestles with the same question every day: Is it finally safe to order five of the container ships she manages stranded in the Persian Gulf to exit the Strait of Hormuz?
For about two months the answer was no. Then, at the beginning of last week, he saw a window of opportunity and gave the green light to one of the ships to cross the strait.
On Monday, just before midnight, under a new moon and with almost no wind, one of his ships, the Tema Express, passed through the strait without incident. The ship, which later anchored near Muscat off the coast of Oman, became the company’s first ship to transit the waterway since the start of the war.
Other merchant ships that attempted the crossing soon after were not so lucky. Two European-owned ships were intercepted and seized by Iranian forces on Wednesday; one of them was attacked by a gunboat without any warning. They are held near the coast of Iran.
More than 20 commercial ships have been attacked around the Bosphorus since March. The attacks began shortly after the first U.S. and Israeli strikes against Iran, which prompted the Iranian military to retaliate by restricting traffic in the vital waterway.
10 sailors died and many sailors were injured during the strikes. Because shipping companies were reluctant to navigate such treacherous waters, nearly 20,000 crew members on nearly 1,600 ships were stranded in and around the strait, through which about a fifth of the world’s oil passed before the war.
Lehmköster, who oversees 310 ships as fleet general manager at shipping giant Hapag-Lloyd, evaluated official advisories, contacted intelligence sources and communicated with sailors on Thursday morning.
As reports continued to come in about the two seized ships, senior leaders discussed the increasing risks to the company’s ships still stranded near the strait. The ships targeted on Wednesday were the first commercial ships Iran had seized since the start of the war.
Last week, the US Navy boarded and took control of Iranian-flagged ships in the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean. US President Donald Trump on Thursday said he had ordered the navy to shoot down any boats laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz.
At Hapag-Lloyd’s six-story headquarters in Hamburg, workers speak a mixture of English and German in corridors with reminders of the company’s long history, including a 2.7-meter model of the Imperator, a steamboat that entered service in 1912. The building is located on the grand boulevard Ballindamm, named after German Jewish shipping magnate Albert Ballin in the late and early 1800s. The 1900s helped the company now known as Hapag-Lloyd become a global conglomerate. Today the company is the fifth largest container shipping group in the world.
In the company’s ground-floor operations room, workers monitored weather forecasts on computers and traffic in the Strait of Hormuz on a giant screen where ships were tracked in real time. Similar control centers exist in other shipping companies around the world; Much of the worldwide industry is focused on this single strait, whose impact on the global economy is becoming alarmingly clear.
Before ordering the other four ships to proceed, Lehmköster said, he would need clear guarantees from the United States and Iran that passage was safe and details on how to avoid naval mines placed in the strait. These assurances did not come.
“You’re basically sending someone unarmed into battle,” Lehmköster said in an interview, noting that stranded ships had no ability to defend themselves.
Lehmköster declined to comment on the route Tema Ekspres took to cross the strait. Industry analysts suggest the strait likely follows a route that includes the coast of Oman, a route some ships pass through without permission from Iranian authorities, who have imposed increasingly tight controls on the strait.
For 39-year-old Lehmköster, who himself has worked at sea for 15 years, the decision about whether sending a ship through the strait was worth the risk was personal, and the responsibility of overseeing ships stranded in a war zone weighed heavily.
About 100 sailors — Ukrainians, Russians, Vietnamese, Sri Lankans, Romanians, Filipinos and others — aboard the four-wire Hapag-Lloyd ship were desperate to return home, he said.
Staying there could also be risky. A few weeks ago, the crew aboard the Hapag-Lloyd ship woke up in the early hours of the morning to sound the alarm after shrapnel from an Iranian missile or drone landed on their ship, starting a fire. No one was injured and the ship is in repair, able to maneuver but having difficulty.
Ship captains try to raise the morale of sailors with events such as barbecues, foosball tournaments, karaoke and movie nights. They continue their regular shifts to care for, monitor and inspect cargo, which often includes furniture, electronics, fruit and frozen fish and meat.
Mixed messages from American and Iranian officials, who have imposed rival blockades and restrictions on traffic in the Persian Gulf, have made it difficult to gauge the risks of passage through the strait, especially from a distance. During the uneasy ceasefire, which is now in its third week, the strait was declared open one moment and closed the next.
In addition to Hapag-Lloyd, other large shipping groups such as France’s CMA CGM and Switzerland’s MSC have also passed some of their ships through the strait in recent days. The ships the Iranians seized this week were owned or operated by MSC.
Danish shipping giant Maersk, whose seven ships were stranded in the area, said conditions were too unsafe for ships to pass.
‘If you are successful, you will receive a great reward’
For some companies, the economic reward is worth the risk, especially as oil, gas and other commodity prices rise. “Usually if you’re successful you get a big reward,” said Jakob Larsen, chief security officer at BIMCO, the world’s largest maritime union.
Even in more peaceful times, the hours-long journey across the Strait of Hormuz can be hair-raising.
It is a narrow area with heavy traffic, 21 nautical miles wide at its narrowest point. Captains must navigate between small fishing boats and oil rigs. The weather is often hazy due to the heat.
Captain Alexander Meier, 48, who last guided ships through the Hapag-Lloyd Strait three years ago, said he tried to project a sense of calm to his crew as they passed Iran. “The captain should never be nervous,” he said. But he always breathes a sigh of relief when he achieves this. “If you go through there there’s always tension,” he said.
Ship captain Charalampos Kiakotos, who has passed the strait more than a dozen times, said this was one of the most difficult passages. The risk of being stranded in a war zone would be particularly stressful because there would be pressure to follow instructions from head office to transit as quickly as possible while also keeping an eye on crew members, he said in a phone interview from the Port of Dos Bocas in Mexico.
“If something happens, everyone will blame the captain and they will say it was the captain’s decision,” said Kiakotos, 45, who works for a Greek shipping company.
“So at the end of the day, I’ll make the final decision.”
