🔍 Key Concepts

• Grounding forces and how they act on a ships hull and bottom • Difference between heel (temporary, external cause) and list (permanent, internal cause like weight shift) • How trim (difference between draft forward and aft) can change when the hull touches bottom at one end or along its length

💭 Think About

• Think about what happens if the ship is supported partly by the ground instead of fully by the water  which parts of the hull are lifted or held up? • Ask yourself: could grounding affect only one side, only one end, or the whole bottom  and what would each of those situations do to heel, list, and trim? • Consider whether these three effects (heel, list, trim change) are mutually exclusive, or if more than one could reasonably occur at the same time when aground.

✅ Before You Answer

• Be clear on definitions: heel vs list vs trim and what physically causes each one. • Visualize different grounding situations: bow on a shoal, stern on a shoal, touching on one bilge only. For each, decide what changes. • Before choosing, ask: can grounding forces alone create all of these conditions, or are any of them impossible without internal weight shifts?