Elbahrain.net Buying a historic cruise ship he found on Craigslist back in 2008 was undoubtedly a life-altering decision for Chris Willson.
The technology entrepreneur from Utah spent around 15 years painstakingly restoring the 293-foot vessel, which contains 85 cabins, a swimming pool and a theater, and even moved on board with his long-term partner Jin Li.
Willson says he poured his life savings into the passion project, and his extraordinary story was picked up by CNN and subsequently many other international publications.
His ultimate goal was to transform the neglected ship into a museum, but things didn’t quite go to plan.
In October 2023, Willson made the painful decision to sell the vessel, which began sinking around seven months later. Now its future looks bleak.
“We absolutely loved our time with that ship,” Willson tells CNN Travel. “It (selling) was probably the hardest thing I’ve done in my life.
“It haunts me and I lose sleep over it. I’m not happy about it.”
So where did it all go wrong?
Willson’s longstanding connection to the retired “pocket” cruise ship, built in Germany, began when he came across a sale listing on the Craigslist classified advertisements website and decided to investigate.
Feeling inspired, Willson decided to purchase his own slice of history. He won’t disclose how much he spent, but says he was able to “work out a really good deal with the owner.”
After doing some digging, he discovered that the vessel, originally named Wappen von Hamburg, was constructed by the Blohm and Voss shipyard in 1955 and had been the first significant passenger liner built by Germany after World War II.
Once he took the ship on, Willson arranged for it to be moved to the California river city of Rio Vista, where it stayed for a year, and renamed it the Aurora after spending his first night on board.
“I woke up to one of the most brilliant sunrises I had ever seen,” Willson told CNN back in 2022.
“It was forming an Aurora type effect with the clouds and water. I remember thinking at that time ‘Aurora’ was a fitting name.”
Willson was later offered a berth in San Francisco’s Pier 38, an arrangement that came to an end after around three years.
In 2012, he had the ship transferred back to the California Delta, California’s largest estuary, mooring the Aurora at Herman & Helen’s Marina in Little Potato Slough, located around 24 kilometers from the city of Stockton in California’s Central Valley.
“We wanted it in fresh water and we wanted it in shallow water,” he explains. “So it was absolutely the best possible location that we could have put it.”
Herman & Helen’s Marina closed down a few years later, but the ship remained at the site.
Although he had no prior experience working on ships, Willson dedicated himself to breathing new life into the Aurora, devoting countless hours to renovating it, with the help of volunteers.
“I’d gotten quite a ways,” he says. “I think we had 10 areas solidly restored and refurnished meticulously. These were kind of major areas. So we were pretty proud of that.
“So we were doing a pretty good job. We had marine engineers involved. (There was) no lack of people coming out to loan a hand.”
“We were working on the swimming pool and the forward decks, and replating all of the steel.
Aside from a few small donations, Willson says he funded the bulk of the renovation work himself.
Although he’s unsure of the exact amount he spent on maintaining the ship and “moving it forward” over the years, he estimates the figure to be well over $1 million.
“We were making terrific progress with the Aurora,” he says. “We had a successful YouTube channel. Everything was looking great.”
However, Willson says he faced much resistance from locals, who weren’t thrilled about having such a huge decommissioned ship moored nearby.
The fact that another large vessel, Canadian MineSweeper HMCS Chaleur, which was moored in the same area, sank in 2021 certainly didn’t help matters.
According to Willson, he received a “three-day notice to quit” on “several occasions,” but local authorities never “followed through with an eviction.”
He goes on to explain that things came to a head when 1940s military tugboat Mazapeta, stationed next to the Aurora, also sank in January, creating a “pollution issue.”
“Everything kind of changed from that point on,” he says, explaining that various local agencies became involved, and it became clear that “there was really no future for the Aurora” at that location.
Although Willson did consider moving the ship, he says he learned that the waterway would’ve likely needed a “million dollars worth of dredging for us to get out.”
However, in May, the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office announced that the Aurora was sinking.
“It has been determined the ship has suffered a hole and is taking on water and is currently leaking diesel fuel and oil into the Delta Waterway,” reads a statement posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, on May 22.
The ship was refloated by contractors hired by a Unified Command, according to the US Coast Guard, which confirmed that it had “recently changed ownership.”
“Over the last several weeks, response contractors, Global Diving and Salvage and subcontractors, successfully refloated the vessel and removed an estimated 21,675 gallons of oily water, 3,193 gallons of hazardous waste, and five 25-yard bins of debris was removed from the vessel,” said a statement shared by California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Office of Spill Prevention and Response on June 28.
“There were no observations of oiled wildlife throughout the response.”
The City of Stockton has since taken over the operation.
According to Connie Cochran, community relations officer for the City of Stockton, there was “was no clear ownership” for the Aurora when the situation occurred and the city is currently “figuring out how to dispose of the vessel.”
“We’re hoping to be getting it out of there in the coming weeks,” Cochran told CNN, pointing out that the size of the ship, along with its location, in an area that isn’t actually within the city limits, has made things even more difficult.
