The sea can be familiar without becoming something you should stop respecting.

Familiarity feels like control, though the sea has learned nothing about you in all that time. Knowing a place well changes what you can anticipate, not what it is capable of. The same gap shows up with machinery, with roads driven a thousand times, with a body you think you have understood. Respect here is not fear, it is just refusing to let comfort do your thinking.

Notice where your caution has quietly thinned because nothing has gone wrong lately. Put back one small precaution you used to take and have stopped taking, and see whether the ease you feel survives the question.