- My name's Christopher Wilson,
and this is the Aurora.
I am a former tech entrepreneur from Santa Cruz, California,
turned into crazy boat guy now [laughs].
In 2008 I was in development
of some of the first virtual tour software,
and I was a code developer at the time.
One day when I was working,
I kept seeing this ship on Craigslist,
and I was really curious.
It was all over the place on price.
It was $600,000.
It went up clear up to like $1.2M
and I was a little stunned
that there would be something like that on Craigslist,
but I wanted more.
I found out that it was the first ship
that Germany was permitted to build post-World War II.
They actually dug the tools out from the rubble
after the bombing of the shipyard that this thing was at.
So, I think that there were so many curious people,
but I'm the guy that actually was crazy enough
to pull the trigger.
Welcome back to the Aurora Restoration Project.
These are the Mercedes-Maybach diesel generators.
This is the diesel engines,
and they have the turbos onboard.
And we actually popped the covers on these things
and they look fantastic inside.
The motors are actually in fantastic condition.
I'm in the galley of the Aurora,
and the galley is by far the worst place, in my opinion,
aboard this ship.
When I first got the ship,
a lot of this stuff was absolute garbage in here.
It had old stoves, ovens, refrigerators.
It had a big dish washing station that was modified, welded.
It was a terrible job somebody did on it,
so we just tore the whole thing out,
and took it all to metal recycling, and got rid of it.
- My name's Jin Lin.
I'm with Chris 14 years with this boat project.
We were dating like a year,
and one Friday night, he comes over, and he say,
"Jin, I find a boat."
He say, "You wanna see it?"
He take me on,
I think it was a Saturday, late afternoon.
The sun start going down.
He bring me onto the boat,
and he say, "You know what?
We're gonna spend a night on a boat."
And I was like, "Okay."
I have no idea what I jump into it.
And when I get into the boat, oh my dear Lord.
Picture, you know, Stephen King, "The Shining."
It was dark,
there was no power,
and the sun start goes down, and we spend the night,
and when you spend the night on the boat the first time,
you can hear all kinds of stuff.
And I was so scared,
but he wakes me up early in the morning,
and we see the sunrise.
It was beautiful.
When you see the water, you see the sunrise,
and I thought he was crazy,
but I with him 14 years since he got a boat,
I'm still with him,
I didn't run anywhere,
and I believe more and more every day for what he's doing,
and I love to see the progress he made,
and to be honest with you,
I'm very happy what he's doing.
[upbeat music]
- This ship still needs so much work.
In order to get this into a state
where we can use it for maybe a museum,
and a bed-and-breakfast,
I'm gonna estimate around $3 million
to get it to that level.
So we've done a number of cabins,
we've done a number of areas aboard the ship,
and we've done a monumental amount of work on the decks,
which were almost completely rotted,
so we have replaced probably 30 percent of the steel on top,
and now we're ready to really push forward
on doing more interior areas of the ship
and we even have —
the only modification that I think we're really gonna do
from the original cruise ship configuration,
is they removed 12 cabins forward
on the deck that we're on now,
which is the A deck,
and it's the perfect area for a theater.
We figured out that you could put about 80 people
in this theater,
and you can do events or movies.
We wanna just make it like a Fifties movie theater.
Our goal is that when people step onboard the ship,
they're actually stepping back
into the 50s and the 60s.
And the people that we're looking to get as volunteers
are people that love to save a piece of history,
and have a little bit of skill
to jump in and come out here
and put in a little bit of time,
helping us actually restore this thing
and put it back into a position
where it can function as a public amusement once again.
A little bit of an important factoid about the history
is this boat was the inspiration
for the television show, "The Love Boat."
It was the SPECTRE headquarters in "From Russia with Love,"
from the James Bond series, 1963.
It's been in a ton of movies and television,
and there's currently a movie that you can watch
called "Venom Coast,"
that was entirely filmed on the ship,
and it's a crazy, slasher flick,
but it's very goofy at the same time.
She's come a long way and she's still got a long way to go,
but that's what we're fighting to do.
We're fighting to actually save this ship
and preserve it for future generations,
and I think we've got a pretty good foothold
on doing just that.