Chris Willson, seen with his partner Jin Li, bought a cruise ship on Craigslist in While he hoped to transform it into a museum, things didn't go to plan. CNN — Buying a historic cruise ship he found on Craigslist back in was undoubtedly a life-altering decision for Chris Willson. The technology entrepreneur from Utah spent around 15 years painstakingly restoring the 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. In October , Willson made the painful decision to sell the vessel, which began sinking around seven months later. Now its future looks bleak. Feeling inspired, Willson decided to purchase his own slice of history. After doing some digging, he discovered that the vessel, originally named Wappen von Hamburg, was constructed by the Blohm and Voss shipyard in 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. 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. These were kind of major areas. So we were pretty proud of that. We had marine engineers involved.
There was no lack of people coming out to loan a hand. Aside from a few small donations, Willson says he funded the bulk of the renovation work himself. Everything was looking great. 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.
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. We were on it all of the time… It just saddens me like nothing else.
