Strait of Magellan
Around five vessels a day — too few for a percentage to mean much.
Far above normal +53% against its 2019–2023 baseline
This route carries too few vessels for a percentage to mean much; the counts below are the honest figure.
Reading for — 6 days ago. Figures are a 30-day mean, so one quiet day does not move them.
Two years of daily transits
Month by month
| Month | Transits/day | vs baseline |
|---|---|---|
| October 2026 | 6 | +59% |
| September 2026 | 6 | +56% |
| August 2026 | 6 | +44% |
| July 2026 | 5 | +33% |
| June 2026 | 5 | +18% |
| May 2026 | 5 | +18% |
The 18 months before that
| Month | Transits/day | vs baseline |
|---|---|---|
| April 2026 | 4 | −5% |
| March 2026 | 4 | −3% |
| February 2026 | 3 | −28% |
| January 2026 | 3 | −13% |
| December 2025 | 4 | −3% |
| November 2025 | 4 | −10% |
| October 2025 | 4 | −8% |
| September 2025 | 4 | +13% |
| August 2025 | 4 | +13% |
| July 2025 | 6 | +44% |
| June 2025 | 4 | +8% |
| May 2025 | 4 | +0% |
| April 2025 | 4 | +5% |
| March 2025 | 4 | −10% |
| February 2025 | 4 | +0% |
| January 2025 | 3 | −15% |
| December 2024 | 4 | −8% |
| November 2024 | 4 | −8% |
Record high 13/day (February 2020), record low 2.3/day (February 2021), on the 30-day mean since January 2019.
Source
Daily transit counts derived from satellite AIS positions by IMF PortWatch, covering 2841 days from 1 January 2019.
Source: IMF PortWatch, https://portwatch.imf.org. PortWatch is published under IMF terms rather than CC BY 4.0, unlike the rest of the data on this site: the figures here are derived and transformed, and the underlying series is not republished.
Flagged, deliberately
This route is marked low-traffic on the board, and the reason is arithmetic rather than editorial. It averages a handful of transits a day, and against a baseline of about four that makes almost any change look dramatic in percentage terms while amounting to one or two ships.
The board therefore refuses to build headline facts from this route, and sorts it to the bottom of the table regardless of how large its percentage looks.
What the count actually shows
Traffic has risen modestly over the past year, from around three a day to around five. The record spans roughly two to seven. Those are the honest numbers, and they are small.
Why it is on the board at all
The Strait of Magellan is one of the two ways around the southern tip of South America, and it is the alternative if the Panama Canal is constrained. It carries little traffic today, and a page that recorded nothing here would have nothing to compare against if that changed.
That is the case for publishing quiet routes: the value is in the baseline, not in today’s reading.