Christopher Willson
This historic cruise ship once had a bright future, but now it’s been repossessed by the city of Stockton, California.
After purchasing the former German passenger liner and “pocket” cruise ship Wappen von Hamburg on Craigslist in 2008, Utah-bred tech entrepreneur Chris Wilson spent 15 years and more than $1 million painstakingly restoring it, CNN reported.
He renamed it Aurora, for a time lived on it with his partner Jin Li, and moved it to multiple California waterways as he poured countless hours into rehabilitating the vessel — with dreams of transforming it into a museum.
For some time, Wilson appeared to be well on his way to giving Aurora a fresh lease on life. That’s until multiple other large ships sunk near where it was moored just outside of Stockton and, realizing “there was really no future for Aurora” at that location, he decided to offload it.
In October 2023, he says, he sold Aurora.
“Maybe Aurora wasn’t in the right place,” Li commented to CNN. “Maybe if Aurora was in a different state, or a different country it would have been different.”
Then, this May, Aurora began 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,” the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office posted on X.
Far from one man’s passion project, it has now become Stockton’s headache. The city has taken over the ship, which community relations officer Connie Cochran told CNN currently has “no clear ownership” and is working on “figuring out how to dispose of the vessel,” a goal that is complicated by the fact that Aurora is located beyond the city’s technical limits and is more than 2,400 tons.
“We absolutely loved our time with that ship,” Wilson told CNN, adding of the present situation: “It haunts me and I lose sleep over it. I’m not happy about it.”