The Tavern

As the subject states. I've always been very careful when navigating the shoals and have never attempted auto-travel, but it's very tedious going...

It's mostly annoying. The rising water will never kill you, outside of edge cases like getting trampled into a deep water tile the turn before your levitation expires. Auto-travel will resist sending you into shallow water, however, even if it's the shortest route, and the pathfinding algorithm can be confused by the fact that an existing path may no longer be usable by the time you get to it. In the worst case, your character will run in a circle for a while until you interrupt autotravel by hitting a button. There's also the risk of encountering monsters, which is a risk with autotravel everywhere.

I generally don't use it for exploration, but inter-level travel through explored territory generally doesn't give me any trouble because I'm not on any given level long enough for pathfinding to break.

I normally don't autoexplore shoals unless I have either permaflight or am a merfolk or octopode. It is theoretically possible for autoexplore to kill you in shoals (I have seen it happen once) if it travels into shallow water while you are flying/ice beastified/levitating etc and then the tide rises and turns the tile into deep water and then your safe-over-water status disappears before you get another action; this is still extremely rare (and can't happen unless you let an effect that lets you cross deep water expire while autoexploring). I know there were some autoexplore changes to shoals since I saw this happen so I'm not sure if it's still possible.

That said it's not a place that's terribly productive to explore, so I usually just dive to shoals:5.

The only time I find myself exploring Shoals is on the way up again, because it's not always that I remember the stairs from which I went down. (And I can't be bothered going to them, now that I already stand on another pair.)