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.”
Costly project
“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.”
“So we were kind of stuck there,” he adds.
While they were desperate to finish what they started, Li says that the situation began to take a huge toll, and the couple felt that they had no other option but to “move on to the next chapter.”
“Maybe Aurora wasn’t in the right place,” she reflects. “Maybe if Aurora was in a different state, or a different country it would have been different.”
When an interested buyer showed up who seemed equally as passionate about saving the ship, they decided to sell it.
Willson stresses that he had every confidence that the unnamed individual was the right person to keep the Aurora going, and spent time talking them through how to maintain the ship.
Over the years, he’d received furniture from other historic ships for the Aurora, which he left on board, along with various pieces of artwork.
When asked about the general condition of the ship at the time, Willson says that while “there were some holes” when he first purchased it, they were “patched professionally” and he never had “any problems” afterwards.
Sinking feeling
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.
Cochran says the next stage will be determining whether the ship, which she described as a “public hazard” and “danger to the environment,” is “structurally stable” enough for a “dead ship tow” to a location where it can be salvaged.
Although Cochran was unable to provide an estimate of the costs for the ongoing operation, which has seen contractors with specialist knowledge brought in, she says the city is hoping to “recoup” some of it.
Willson, who maintains that he filed the change of ownership for the Aurora with the Coast Guard Vessel documentation center, says he was surprised when he learned that the ship had partially sunk.
“I didn’t see it sinking,” he says. “We had it for 15 years, and we had no problem with it.”
CNN has been unable to independently confirm the current registered owner of the ship.
“I meticulously maintained that ship,” adds Willson. “I checked everything on it multiple times every day. We were on it all of the time… It just saddens me like nothing else.”
Willson has faced heavy criticism for seemingly abandoning the Aurora, with local residents expressing concern about the costs to the City of Stockton.
He admits that he’s found some of the commentary “tough,” but hasn’t given up on the ship, and plans to do everything he can to help the buyer he handed it over to reclaim it, with the aim of preventing it from being scrapped.
“I don’t really want to let it go,” he adds. “But it’s no longer my vessel.”
Willson looks back on his time with the ship fondly, recounting how he discovered its original name after removing “six or seven coats of paint” from the vessel when he first began working on it.
He later learned that the 2,496 gross ton ship had been the inspiration for popular TV series “The Love Boat,” as well as a serving as filming location for the Spectre criminal organization headquarters in the 1963 Bond movie “From Russia with Love.”
The vessel served as a cruise ship for around two years, says Willson, going through several different owners, as well as names, before it was moored in Vancouver.
It was towed to Alameda, California in 2005 after even more changes in both ownership and name. The ship was set to be turned into a luxury yacht at one stage, but this never came to fruition.
It subsequently remained at Alameda for several years, before being purchased by a businessman, who went on to list the ship on Craigslist.
Historic ship
Willson says the ship was in bad condition and “slowly succumbing to the encroaching water” before he spotted that advertisement in 2008.
“Nobody knew what the history of the vessel was,” he says. “And over time, we exposed so much of its history.
“We turned it from just a big ship floating out on the Delta that was rusting away, to probably one of the most famous vintage cruise ships in the world.
“And I’ve got to be proud of that.”
Willson says it pains him to see so many historic ships being scrapped, and he remains hopeful that things will turn out differently for the Aurora, even if he has to watch it play out from a distance.
“There’s only three historic liners left in the United States, and another one of them is about to see its fate as well,” he says, referring to retired ocean liner SS United States, which has been ordered to leave Philadelphia’s Delaware River.
“So then there’s only going to be the Queen Mary (a retired ocean liner moored at Long Beach that’s now a popular tourist attraction) that’s left.
“So it is very sad to see such famous ships eventually just dismantled, especially for no good reason.”
Willson received a huge amount of support from well wishers while he was restoring the ship, with some even traveling to the site in California to see it.
He also built a huge community, with other 12,000 followers on the Aurora Restoration Project’s Facebook page, and more than 80,000 subscribers to the YouTube channel for the project.
“It was such a well known vessel,” he says. “And it had everybody’s hearts.
“To this day, it keeps me awake at night time thinking about it. Thinking, ‘What can I do in order to help the situation out?’
“And at the same time, I don’t want to, you know, step over my bounds.”
Willson and Li, who have since left California, are currently searching for a new project, stressing that they’re looking for something on land, possibly an old church or mansion, this time around.
“We haven’t found the right one,” Willson says, adding that they’ve “almost landed a deal a couple of times.”
Learning experience
Although things definitely haven’t turned out the way he’d hoped, Willson has absolutely no regrets about buying the ship, and says he would do it all over again if he had the choice.
In fact, he describes his memories with the ship and the “efforts poured into her preservation” as some of the best of his life.
“I’ve never had a single regret about saving something like that,” adds Willson, who says he hasn’t visited the Aurora since the beginning of the year. “Was it a success?
“Keeping it on this Earth for an extra 15 years when it would have probably sank and then (been) scrapped out…
“I don’t have any regrets on what I’ve done. It’s been a great learning experience and showed a lot of people my abilities.
“I couldn’t ask for anything more.”
Li is also positive about the future of the Aurora despite the precariousness of its current position, pointing to the countless setbacks the ships has faced in the many years since it was built.
“Aurora is a fighter,” says Li. “I mean, she always fights. There’s so many times she changed hands. Got abandoned. Got almost scrapped.
“But she still is floating today. I told Chris, ‘Maybe it’s a sad story for us. We couldn’t move Aurora more forward.
“But at least Aurora is fighting her own fight. She doesn’t want to get scrapped… Wappen von Hamburg doesn’t want to die.’”
