I am not letting you guys off the hook.
If the sheets are hanging up, fouling, jamming, and are otherwise full of surprises, successful tacking technique has not been achieved.
Work on it. Know what to keep a little tension on. Analyze each foul and figure out how to outsmart it before it happens, every time.
Sure it's a safety thing, in heavy air rounding the Horn and so on, but -- what it really is is, do I know how to sail my boat? Am I a beginner forever, a permanent intermediate, or just an expert who fell asleep? Do I have 20 years' experience, or only one year's experience, 20 times?
We must control the sheets and not let them control us. Can it be done?
You're kidding, right? You think America's Cup teams foul the genoa sheets? You think the winner of the beer can series fouls the sheets when tacking? You think every experienced skipper doesn't feel like a dope when he has to say, "run up there on the foredeck and clear that foul"? He does, because he knows he just screwed up.
This is a sport. How many years have you worked on your backhand, or concentrated on eyeballing the football all the way into your hands, or quietly gone to a driving range in prep for Saturday on the golf course? Practice there is taken for granted.
Practice of technique is everything in sailing, but few of us, after learning to sail, bother with it at all.
If you foul the sheets while jibing a planing dinghy in 25 knots, you get a violent cold bath -- and quickly develop technique that avoids fouling the sheets.
Yet on cruising boats, it's a shrug. Oh well, no reason to figure out how to do it right and do it right every time, in 5 knots or 40, solo or with racing crew or with grandma aboard. Really?
Every foul is a failure of anticipation and technique. Every foul is a mistake.
I'm not letting myself off the hook, either. I want to still improve, even at this age. And it goes beyond pride.
Sloppy technique hurts people when the wind comes up.
This team is a good example: they lost their boat by failure of technique and a failure of anticipation of almost everything:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVJYDWkJg_w&list=PLXJx_F6E8T8y8BVNBmmZ1c9udOwnNjx93&index=11