Tested: Bering 92
In the Shadow of Olympus
Turkish built in steel and aluminum, this capable one-off displacement motoryacht combines elegant appointments with a crazy cruising range.
Mount Olympus was the home of the gods. Naturally, no-one today can be quite certain which particular mountain all those ancient myths refer to, and there are plenty of candidates in the eastern Mediterranean. But the Mount Olympus in the Taurus range near Antalya would seem to have as good a claim as any. It rises seemingly straight out of the sea to nearly 8,000 feet, and even in April its snow-capped peak lent a somber, wintry grandeur to the sunny shoreline, where springtime was well under way.
These waters off southern Turkey are some of the most perfect in the Med for cruising, and I met the Bering 92 at anchor off the small fishing harbor of Poyraz Pasa, a few miles south of the city. Company boss Alexei Mikhailov saw us waving from the breakwater and came over in the Hysucat catamaran RIB tender—he builds those too—to pick us up. As we sat down to breakfast in the salon, the anchor chain rattled up the hawse and the yacht got under way again, heading south.
Berings are built in Antalya. It wasn’t the stunning scenery that brought Alexei here but the relaxed regulatory environment of the Free Port, where low wages and low taxes, plus a proximity to Western suppliers and markets, proved irresistible. He built six boats in China before coming to Turkey. “There were quality issues there,” he explained. “You don’t have complete control, because as a foreigner you can’t own the shipyard—it was hard.” He established Bering in 2007, and at the time of our visit there were 14 boats in build in the Antalya sheds, from 65 feet in length up to the biggest, a nearly complete 145.
Alexei, 59, is happy to talk about his childhood in the Soviet Union, but he doesn’t try to sell it as a rags-to-riches story. It’s a lot more interesting than that. His parents were engineers, “high-paid professionals,” who were working in the far east Russian town of Magadan when he was born. It’s a long way from anywhere except the Bering Sea—hence the company name—but the family prospered. Alexei learned to fish, got an education, and spent summers with his grandparents in Crimea. By the time he finished his PhD, in hydrogeology, Gorbachev’s reforms were opening the door to market economics and Alexei decided he’d rather be an entrepreneur than a scientist.
Which is how, in Magadan in 2000, he became the owner of a small fleet of fishing boats and a processing plant. Was he successful? “No,” he laughs. “It’s a tough business. The up-front costs are high, the catching is a gamble, the regulations are onerous, and the markets are volatile.” He didn’t work aboard the boats, but when he did go out on them, he learned some powerful lessons: “I have seen six-millimeter steel twisted like a tin can,” he says. “It’s a hostile sea up there, and a hostile coast—the boat is everything. Forget the life raft, forget making it to shore—it would be of no use. It’s all about the boat.”
The experience left him with an abiding appreciation of the ship- and yacht-building Classification Rules: “We respect them, because we firmly believe in them.”
So, it’s perhaps not too surprising that when Alexei started building boats, they were of the bomb-proof variety. Like all Berings, the 92 has a steel hull and aluminum superstructure, a full-displacement hull design and an enormous fuel capacity. The swoopy styling rather belies her rugged, go-anywhere engineering, but this 92 is a one-off, in contrast to the yard’s current focus on semi-custom boats based on fixed designs. There are two principal fixed design models, an 80 and a 75, which share a stocky, upright character along with a vast internal volume, thanks to their full form and immense beam. There has been plenty of interest, Alexei claims, and they will all be built to order, with full input from the owners and their surveyors. “We insist on surveyors,” says Alexei. “Captains don’t know enough. We learn a lot from our owners’ surveyors.”
With her conventional round-bilge hull, generously upswept stern sections, and a transom that consequently doesn’t sit too deep, the 92 is more traditional than she seems. And just like her boxier siblings, she’s pretty big inside—it gets quite tiring measuring headroom when it doesn’t fall below 6 feet 8 inches. She has a superyacht layout, with a full-beam master on the main deck which is served by a low-level head down a curved staircase in the bow, as well as a door leading out to the foredeck. Down below, the four en suite guest cabins can sleep nine, in three double berths and three singles. There might be a slight lack of clothes hanging space in the double cabins, but there are big drawers under the berths. The interior, with its stripey mahogany-veneered cabinets and oak-clad floors, has been fitted out entirely according to the owner’s wishes. The fit-out quality looked pretty good.
While the guest cabins below sleep up to nine comfortably, a glance above deck shows that those same guests will fit more than adequately on the aft deck or fore deck as well. Bear in mind the layout of this boat is made to order with full input from owners.
The 92’s engine room was a surprise. There didn’t appear to be any engines. In fact, it’s a lofty, two-tier machinery space with the twin six-cylinder Cummins engines mounted low down beneath a tread-plate sole which needs to be lifted for inspection and servicing. The upper tier consequently has a very spacious feel, with a useful workbench and easy access to the heating and ventilation equipment, fuel handling systems, hydraulics and generators.
With the pines, rocky headlands and sandy beaches of the Turkish shoreline ghosting by to starboard, the mountains just inland looked so massive and immobile that we hardly appeared to be moving at all. But in fact the 92 was slipping through the water quite efficiently, with minimal fuss at low and moderate rev settings. Tanks full, this yacht displaces nearly 150 tons, so there is an imperturbable quality to the way she makes progress, helped by the hushed atmosphere in the wheelhouse, where the sound meter struggled to find anything above 50 dBA. We were pretty light on fuel, but with the four main tanks mounted dead amidships and a 400-gallon day tank down between the engines, this had no adverse effect on trim.
Only at maximum revs does the stern start to squat, as you might expect, causing the fuel consumption curve to head skywards. Alexei has had plenty of time to undertake yard trials on the boat, and as we cruised a few miles offshore, heading south with the snow-capped peak of Mount Olympus ever present, he explained that for maximum range, one engine was the way to go. “Fifteen hundred revs on one engine, that’s the sweet spot,” he said. So we tried it, and our figures confirmed his conclusions: at 1,500 rpm, at a speed of 8.4 knots (it’s 10 knots with two engines), burning 10.3 gallons per hour (as opposed to 16-plus) the range works out at more than 4,400 nautical miles, a clear 1,200-mile improvement over the two-engine figure.
The chain rattled down the hawse again as we rounded up into the breeze and anchored a hundred yards off a long, straight, sandy beach. It was lunchtime. “Do you see that valley?” asked Alexei, pointing to a dark cleft in the trees at its southern end. “In there are some old ruins. It’s the ancient city of Olympus.”
One of several contenders, no doubt. I’m happy to believe it.
Bering 92 Test Report
Bering 92 Specifications:
LOA: 95’5”
Beam: 22’1”
Draft: 5’ 7”
Displacement: 324,074 lb.
Fuel: 6,076 gal.
Water: 925 gal.
Power: 2/610-hp Cummins QSM-11
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This article originally appeared in the October 2023 issue of Power & Motoryacht magazine.
Source: https://www.powerandmotoryacht.com/cruisers/bering-92-sea-trial-and-yacht-review
