Pulling up to a restaurant in Virginia Beach for a blind date, Sheena Jeffers couldn’t find a place to park.

With all the spots taken, she paused in an unmarked area, unsure of what to do. Noticing her distress, her date approached the car.

“Do you think this is a parking spot?” she asked.

“Sure!” he said with a shrug. “Make it one.”

Over drinks, her date revealed his intention to sail the world. Jeffers was charmed, and before long they were back at his place enjoying a soak in his hot tub. As Jeffers tells it, their initial interaction was just the beginning of her date encouraging her to take up space in the world.

A year later, after purchasing a very broken sailboat with a high interest loan, selling off most of their possessions and renting out Jeffers’ condo, the duo embarked on a two-year voyage from Norfolk through the Caribbean. Their journey is recounted in “Living Tidal,” Jeffers’ recently published memoir about romance, adventure and finding herself on the high seas.

Prior to her blind date, Jeffers was having a rough go of things. After graduating from Virginia Commonwealth University with a journalism degree in 2008, just in time to catch the collapse of the global economy and another round of layoffs at many newspapers, Jeffers found herself bouncing from job to job. At the time that she met “Kallan,” as her romantic partner is referred to in the book, Jeffers was employed full-time in an administrative role at a struggling nonprofit while working three additional part-time jobs.

“I was doing all of these things and none of them were making me enough money to survive,” says Jeffers, who grew up in Mechanicsville and Virginia Beach. “You’re drowning in school loans, you’re drowning in bank fees, you’re drowning in all of these bills that are now coming in.”

Jeffers was initially skeptical of Kallan’s plan to sail the world, but eventually warmed to the idea. Her friends and family, on the other hand, didn’t like the thought of her leaving her job and sailing away with someone she’d just met.

“They had an absolutely valid response, which is shock and horror. They were completely shocked that I would do something so risky,” says Jeffers, who now lives in Richmond. “People were saying, ‘You’re committing career suicide.’ And I remember being like, ‘What career?’ I had, by that point, already had to revisualize my life many times.”

Fixing up the boat, a French-made Catamaran Catana 431 named “Seas Hope” that had once been demasted—a term for when the mast of a ship has been removed—was quite a lot of work. A chance encounter with a French marine electrician was crucial to making the boat seaworthy.

Before Jeffers and Kallan began their journey, the Richmond Times-Dispatch published a feature about them titled “Seizing Life by the Sails.” The online comments weren’t exactly kind; “Must be nice to be rich,” one person posted. Jeffers stresses how small their budget was.

“We were able to make it work with the finances that we had, but it was not fancy,” she says. “This was not a parent-funded or trust fund-funded adventure. This was something that we scraped money for, that we moved pennies around for. We didn’t have lovely things like ice on the boat. We did it in a way that was very rugged.”

The couple had many adventures along their journey, including encountering heavy storms at sea, sailing through the Panama Canal on another boat called the Hogfish Maximus and snorkeling in Thunderball Grotto, an underwater cave in the Bahamas made famous by the James Bond film of its namesake.

In Panama, they encountered an Indigenous people known as the Guna. The matriarchal society, who refer to themselves as “Dule” or “Tule,” gifted Jeffers and Kallan with a small live turtle, as well as lobsters and crabs for eating. As the couple was about to set sail, they were asked if they could take a young Guna girl with them to the United States for schooling. Jeffers and Kallan did their best to decline in a respectful, tactful way.

On her journey, Jeffers had to constantly contend with the corrosion of the electronics on which she stored her notes and journal entries.

“Out there on the water, the salt is just everywhere. It comes up in splashes. It’s in the air,” she says. “I went through multiple cell phones and multiple laptops and multiple hard drives, because salt just kept eating away at everything.”

“This was not a parent-funded or trust fund-funded adventure. This was something that we scraped money for, that we moved pennies around for. We didn’t have lovely things like ice on the boat. We did it in a way that was very rugged.”

While Jeffers’ voyage was sparked by romance, she and Kallan eventually parted ways. Jeffers says that they’re still friends, and that Kallan loves the memoir.

“The breakup was just something we both felt in our hearts was something that needed to happen,” she says. “We just knew that what we were supposed to do together was done, and the next chapter for him and me did not involve each other.”

Jeffers is now married to someone else with whom she has two kids; she says her husband is supportive of her and her memoir.

“He read it when we were dating and he really liked it,” she says. “He helps me with all of the backend business part of promoting and selling the book. He makes time and space for me to do all of the work that I do.”

In writing her memoir, Jeffers says she was attempting to capture both the post-college experience of many millennials and craft a book that shows what it’s like for an average person to pick up sailing and take off. In general, Jeffers says there are two types of sailing books: those by people who have a long family history of sailing and those by people with massive amounts of money who hire people to wipe down their boats while they lounge about with a cocktail in hand.

“This is neither of those things,” she says. “It comes with no family heritage of sailing and no massive wealth. It’s just a very in-debt millennial that tried to make something work and ended up in the same ocean with all those other sailors.”

The book has been well received so far.

“Amazon sold out of them in 48 hours, which I was so pumped on,” she says. “I’m excited that people are loving it and feeling energized by it.”

Overall, Jeffers hopes the book motivates people to try something new.

“It can be small,” she says. “It can be signing up for a dance class that they’ve always been afraid to take. Anything that speaks to their curiosity or their passions.”

Among other takeaways from her journey, Jeffers says she loved encountering the barter economy found among sailors. This type of exchange took on a personal dimension when she offered yoga lessons in George Town on Grand Exuma. Her classes proved valuable: donations included cash, homemade roasted almonds, a mechanic’s offer to fix her engine, some boat-baked muffins and a Mason jar of sweet tea.

When Jeffers and Kallan left George Town after a month, The Net, a marine radio program that acts as a news service and a forum for community announcements, gave Jeffers a “standing ovation,” achieved by people clicking their radios on and off.

In her memoir, Jeffers recounts a woman who had otherwise remained silent during the radio program chiming in: “I would like to offer one more ‘thank you’ to Sheena for her classes; they were very special.”

A second “standing ovation” began. As Jeffers sat next to the radio, her eyes began to well with tears.