San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
SHIPWRECKED ON THE DELTA
RESCUING A DERELICT CRUISE SHIP ISN’T A PROJECT FOR EVERYONE. BUT DREAMERS AND DROPOUTS HAVE LONG FOUND THEIR WAY TO THE SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY
LITTLE POTATO SLOUGH, San Joaquin County — Chris Willson didn’t mean to end up in the delta.
The marshes, the cornfields, the deadend levee roads, the isolation. The Santa Cruz resident wasn’t seeking any of these things when he responded to an unusual Craigslist ad offering up a cruise ship.
Yet life is known to take strange turns, especially in this watery frontier at the edge of the Bay Area. Today, up a remote river channel named Little Potato Slough, Willson and his girlfriend, along with their cat and dog, live aboard the 293footlong Aurora, a 65yearold luxury liner that was once royalty of the high seas and inspiration for television’s “Love Boat.”
Now it sits idle, a giant amid the wetlands.
Here, the couple have exclusive run of the sun decks, stately reception galleries and Art Deco lounge. When night falls, they have their pick of 85 boutique cabins. Their Mercedes and pickup are parked ashore if they want to lose their sea legs and head to town.
Nonetheless, their time on the water hasn’t been so much a pleasure cruise as a toilsome fight to
keep the fivestory structure afloat. For more than a decade, Willson has struggled to save the vessel, first from the scrapyard, then from prowlers and county regulators, and, almost always from its own slow decay.
His hope is to restore the German-built craft to its post-World War II grandeur. The pandemic has only complicated matters, tightening the supply of materials and labor for the project.
“Going from a beautiful life in Santa Cruz to the delta is not the luxury you might think, but we’ve made it comfortable,” said Willson, 48, as he sat in a leather chair in the lounge, sunshine pouring in from big windows that look out over a long, soggy plain. “And think, what would have happened to this boat if I hadn’t stepped in?”
Before acquiring the ship, Willson had never heard of the Sacramento San Joaquin River Delta. For him, like for many, however, it has afforded the space and freedom to do something very different.
At the confluence of California’s two longest rivers, the delta is 1,100 square miles of lowlands south of Sacramento and a major source of the state’s water. It’s prized for being off the grid, but it’s also an estuary on the brink. The pumps and pipes that send flows to distant cities and farms have diminished the water supply, its quality and the wildlife that live here.
California leaders are considering fixes including a massive water tunnel endorsed by Gov. Gavin Newsom to stabilize exports. But local communities, where livelihoods such as farming, fishing and tourism are wed to the water, don’t welcome the intervention. They feel under attack.
So do the dreamers, dropouts and unconventional sorts who have made this outpost their home.
The 700 miles of waterways are the turf of reclusive fishermen. Loners welcoming the title “delta rat” hole up in waterfront shanties. What might be Northern California’s largest “tiny home” community thrives with a vision of sustainable country living. The late hotel magnate and duck hunter Barron Hilton built a vast wilderness playground here.
Willson’s place is among the more unusual. His plan is not to turn his 2,500ton boat into an operational cruise ship, but renovate its historic facade and interior in the hope of putting it to use as a specialty theater, hotel or event center — at least when the pandemic has passed. Many of the basics are taken care of, including electricity, fed by generators and solar panels, and water and waste, which can be trucked in and out as needed.
Still, there’s a lot to do. Many of the rooms and decks show their age, with wobbly floors, peeling paint, and creaking windows and doors.
Willson doesn’t have the millions of dollars it would take to complete the work, which he likens to upgrading an entire block of houses. However, the enterprising boatman, with a slight mustache, purposeful brow and boyish grin, has hope. His infectious optimism has won him interest from a nearby delta town that has considered tapping the craft as a tourist attraction and from potential investors in Silicon Valley. “This room here — imagine it coming to life,” Willson said as he looked toward a stage, where he occasionally hosts jazz bands for friends willing to make the trek to his swampy doorstep. “There are a lot of people who have respect for what we’re doing. But there are a lot of people who don’t.”
When the Craigslist ad appeared in 2008 for what was once the Wappen von Hamburg, seeking $ 1.2 million, Willson wasn’t looking to preserve a chapter of maritime history. But he was curious. Willson had always liked repairing things and had worked 12 years for a disaster recovery company, salvaging equipment after hurricanes and fires.
“The ad just kept popping up online,” he recalled. “The next thing I knew, I’m in my car driving to the delta.”
Even before Willson arrived at a small island 20 miles from where the boat sits today on the rural outskirts of Stockton, his enthusiasm for the cruiser was blossoming. He’d begun reading about the Wappen von Hamburg — translation: Coat of Arms of Hamburg — and admiring its onetime stardom and exotic forays.
The ship was built in Hamburg in 1955. For the Germans, the first of its kind expedition vessel was part of a national rebirth after World War II. Its maiden run was a 1,600person day cruise in the North Sea.
“This ship was pretty advanced,” said Dirk Toepfer, a physicist and history buff from Bremen, Germany, who during a visit to the Bay Area rented a car so he could drive two hours to the delta to see the craft. “Taking the road through the fields, it’s pretty deserted ... but it was an amazing trip. There are very few ships ( like this) still in existence.”
After less than a decade, the Wappen von Hamburg was retrofitted for its heyday as a luxury liner. With a swimming pool, spa, large terrace and airconditioned suites, the boat went on to cruise the Greek Islands, Alaska and the South Pacific. It changed ownership at least 10 times and was renamed nearly as often, the Aurora just the latest.
Peter Knego, a cruise journalist and historian in Oceanside ( San Diego County), described the ship as uniquely elegant, from the graceful curves of the exterior bow to the dramatic elliptical stairwell in the main reception hall.
“It’s a whole look of shipbuilding that has long since vanished,” he said.
The boat’s prestige landed it a role as the oceanic headquarters of a crime organization in the 1963 James Bond thriller “From Russia With Love.” But perhaps its greatest celebrity came when Jeraldine Saunders, who masterminded “Love Boat,” credited the ship with helping conceive her sassy tales of travel and romance.
“This was the first step in a series that led to the show and the birth of cruising for a mass market,” Knego said.
The Aurora’s luster had largely faded when Willson got his first look, rust and rot taking hold. The boat had been cast aside as new cruise ships, twice as big, emerged and wowed passengers with 3D theaters and water slides. In the 1990s, a fringe Christian group in Los Angeles acquired it and converts began living aboard. Later, the Coast Guard seized it before another owner towed it to Northern California.
At the delta’s Decker Island, Willson was greeted on a dock by a watchman in overalls accompanied by a pit bull, he recalled. The man — who at a later point offered coffee made with water from his dog’s bowl — pressured Willson for gas money before motoring the two in a beatup Boston Whaler through a marsh to what was then a junkfilled ship.
“It looked like hell,” Willson remembered.
Making matters worse, he said, he learned that the State Lands Commission had ordered the owner to move the vessel, which the owner couldn’t afford. The ship was at risk of being towed off for demolition at the owner’s expense.
Derelict boats have long been a problem in the delta. Leaking fuel, oil and metals pose a threat to rivers and sloughs that provide water to the farms of the San Joaquin Valley and close to 30 million people from the Bay Area to Southern California.
“If you just left a car on the side of I5, it would be an issue, but here ( with a boat) it’s
“Going from a beautiful life in Santa Cruz to the delta is not the luxury you might think, but we’ve made it comfortable.”
CHRIS WILLSON, 48, PICTURED AT RIGHT IN THE AURORA’S GRAND BALLROOM