What about this idea of a business plan ? buy 5 of those ships very cheap, get rid of/deliver the goods, merge them in international waters nearby San Francisco, make a top notch/self sustaining mix of offices and Corp housing on top of them. Anybody could work there waiting for their H1B or just simply contracting or bootstrapping their companies.
You know what would probably be both cheaper (in terms of capex and opex) and also more convenient than welding a few old cargo boats together? Building this office park on land, in Gilroy. There's a train line down there and everything - bet it'd be cheaper to bribe Caltrain to beef up the service than to set up transportation to the open ocean.
How about we find a way to transmit data packets across the globe so that people who do digital jobs can work from a nice place that suits them, anywhere in the world.
