Why did it used to be harder to sail over deep ocean, compared to shallow waters
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If you’re talking about the literal act of not capsizing your boat, you have a lot of good answers.
If you’re talking about navigating, then the answer is *longitude*. It’s really easy to see how far north or south you are, because the earth’s spinning axis points towards Polaris so all you need is to measure how high the “North Star” is in the sky. To tell how far east or west you are, without GPS, requires you to compare when the sun goes down where you are compared to where you left port. To do this you need to have *extremely* accurate clocks, which were a real pain to invent.
For a really good look into the topic that’s pretty layman-friendly I suggest the book Longitude by Dava Sobel.
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