Around midday on Feb. 2, a large wave began its slow rumble toward the Aisland 1, an 800-ton deck barge floating in the waters between Dubai and Iran. On board the vessel were its residents of more than a year: a 58-year-old Italian businessman named Samuele Landi, three sailors, a cook and five cats.

Landi — the ship’s captain — was a gifted computer programmer who in a previous life had been the chief executive of Eutelia, a telecommunications company. He fancied himself an Italian Steve Jobs, though John McAfee, the cybersecurity entrepreneur turned tax fugitive, might have been a more fitting comparison. An avid skydiver and motorcycle racer, Landi liked to live on the edge: of the world, of the law and of life itself. He had made a career of exotic offshore financial schemes; now, adrift, he had become one with them.

“I will die at sea for sure,” he told Oswald Horowitz, a filmmaker who had visited him the previous December. “I’m not going back.”

The barge was Landi’s biggest adventure yet. A rusting rectangular hulk with the footprint of a large commercial aircraft, the Aisland had a deck fitted with six blue shipping containers bolted in place. These were the living quarters, equipped with solar-powered air-conditioners and a desalination system. The barge was otherwise littered with equipment: ropes, crates, fans, tanks of oil and water, a freezer containing pounds of red meat, and a sack of reinforced concrete mix for repairs. A Liberian flag flapped in the breeze.