THE SKIPPER WHICH WAS SEIZED TWO WEEKS AGO IS NOW OFFSHORE AT GALVESTON

Oil tanker seized off Venezuelan waters by US now off Galveston coast

The Skipper was taken two weeks ago by Armed Forces personnel.

 

By Timothy Malcolm

 

Chron

Dec 22, 2025

 

 

Worldwide ship tracker MarineTraffic shows the Skipper arrived in the Galveston Offshore Lightering Area at 7:01 a.m. CST Dec. 21.  

 

The floating symbol of the escalating conflict between the U.S. government and Venezuela is now parked right outside Galveston. The Skipper, popularly known as the oil tanker seized off the Venezuelan coast by the U.S. two weeks ago, has found its way to the Gulf of Mexico, according to multiple reports.

Worldwide ship tracker MarineTraffic shows the Skipper arrived in the Galveston Offshore Lightering Area at 7:01 a.m. CST Dec. 21. Fellow tracker VesselTracker shows the Skipper moored at GOLA as of 2:21 a.m. Monday.

Skipper, a 1,090-foot-long Class A tanker, was first sanctioned by the U.S. in 2022 for allegedly being part of an oil smuggling network financed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Hezbollah and operated by a Switzerland-based Ukrainian oil trader. Trackers have allegedly found the Skipper sending illicit oil to China and Russia.

Moreover, the Skipper had apparently been flying the Guaynese flag as a way to shield its true identity, which is a violation of maritime rules.

"It's quite audacious," Michelle Wiese Bockmann, of maritime intelligence firm Windward, recently told the Associated Press. "Here's this falsely flagged Guyana ship purporting to be in a Guyana oil field. It's quite bizarre."

The seizure is reportedly one way President Donald Trump is attempting to squeeze oil-dependent Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, who is accused by the U.S. of narcoterrorism and conspiracy to import drugs. U.S. Coast Guard, Marine Corps and special forces personnel dropped onto the Skipper on Dec. 10 and assumed control of the vessel. There were reportedly 2 million barrels of crude oil on the Skipper when seized.

Reactions to the seizure have naturally been all over the place, with some politicians praising Trump for bringing further aggression to Maduro; others, meanwhile, think the U.S. is dangerously close to war with Venezuela.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced the seizure of a second tanker leaving Venezuela over the weekend. A third is also being targeted, per the BBC.