Mount Olympus was the mythical home of the gods. Naturally, no one today can be quite certain which 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, Turkey, would seem to have as good a claim as any. It seems to rise straight out of the sea to nearly 8,000 feet. Even in spring, the snow-capped peak lends a somber, wintry grandeur to the sunny shoreline, where springtime is well underway.

These waters are some of the most ideal in the Med for cruising. I met the Bering 92 at anchor off the small fishing harbor of Poyraz Pasa. Bering owner and CEO Alexei Mikhailov saw us waving from the breakwater and came over to pick us up in the Hysucat catamaran RIB tender (he builds those too). As we sat down to breakfast in the salon aboard the 92, the anchor chain rattled up the hawse and the yacht got underway.

Berings are built in Antalya, which has the relaxed regulatory environment of the Free Zone, low wages, low taxes and proximity to Western suppliers and markets. Before he started building in Turkey, Mikhailov built six boats in China, which was not the same.

“There were quality issues there,” he said. “You don’t have complete control because as a foreigner, you can’t own the shipyard. It was hard.”

He established Bering in 2007. At the time of this writing, there were 14 boats in build in the Antalya sheds, from 65 feet in length up to a nearly complete 145.

Mikhailov, 59, grew up in the Soviet Union, where his parents were engineers—“high-paid professionals,” he says, who worked in the far eastern Russian town of Magadan. It’s a long way from anywhere except the Bering Sea (hence the company name), but the family prospered. Mikhailov learned to fish, got an education and spent summers with his grandparents in Crimea. By the time he finished his Ph.D. in hydrogeology, Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms were opening the door to market economics. Mikhailov 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 says with a laugh. “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 6-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.”

So, it’s perhaps not surprising that when Mikhailov started building boats, they were of the bombproof variety. Like all Berings, the 92 has a full-displacement steel hull and aluminum superstructure, and a generous fuel capacity. The civilized, contemporary styling belies the yacht’s rugged, go-anywhere engineering and classification standards.

This 92 is a one-off, in contrast to the yard’s current focus on semi-custom boats. Its two principal fixed-design models, an 80 and a 75, 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, Mikhailov says, and they will all be built to order, with input from the owners and their surveyors. “We insist on surveyors,” he says. “Captains don’t know enough. We learn a lot from our owners’ surveyors.”

The 92 is also more traditional than she seems, with a conventional round-bilge hull, generously upswept stern sections and a transom that doesn’t sit too deep. Like her boxier siblings, she’s extremely roomy inside. Headroom doesn’t fall below 6 feet, 8 inches. There’s a superyacht layout, with a full-beam master stateroom on the main deck and a door leading out to the foredeck. Belowdecks, the four en suite guest staterooms can sleep nine, in three double berths and three singles. The interior, with mahogany-veneer cabinets and oak-clad soles, has been fitted out according to the owner’s spec.

The 92’s engine room is a surprise: At first, there don’t appear to be any engines. It’s a lofty, two-tier machinery space with the twin six-cylinder Cummins diesels mounted low, beneath a tread-plate sole that needs to be lifted for inspection and servicing. The upper tier has a spacious feel, with a workbench and easy access to the heating and ventilation equipment, fuel handling systems, hydraulics and generators.

Those power plants slip the 92 through the water quite efficiently, with minimal fuss at low and moderate revs. 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.

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 decibels—the same as a quiet refrigerator. We were pretty light on fuel, but with the four main tanks mounted dead amidships and a 400-gallon day tank between the engines, the load had no adverse effect on trim.

Only at maximum revs did the stern start to squat, causing the fuel-consumption curve to head skyward. Mikhailov says that for maximum range, using only one of the two engines is the way to go.

“Fifteen hundred revs on one engine: That’s the sweet spot,” he says. We tried it, and our figures confirmed his conclusions. At 1,500 rpm and 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 1,200-nautical-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?” Mikhailov asked, 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. 

For more information: beringyachts.com

Bering 92

LOA: 95ft. 5in. (29m)
Beam: 22ft.1in (6.7m)
Draft: 5ft. 7in. (1.7m)
Displacement: 324,074 lbs.
Fuel: 6,076 gal.
Water: 925 gal.
Engines: 2x 610-hp Cummins QSM-11

This article was originally published in the Winter 2023 issue.