The Wayfarer

A shakedown cruise aboard Lemanjá, a new Bering 76, includes springtime in the Mediterranean, and summer in the high latitudes of Iceland and Greenland.

By Alan Harper

June 12, 2023

Turkey’s Taurus Mountains are only a few miles from the coast, but they tower so high that there’s plenty of snow up top, even in April. Down at sea level, warm sunshine perfumes the air with springtime herbs, which do tend to work on the appetite. I was constantly checking my watch to see if it was lunchtime.

We were in the region aboard Lemanjá, a new Bering 76 owned by Michael and Claudia. They had a long voyage ahead of them: all the way to Canada, ultimately, by way of the Faroe Islands, Iceland and Greenland. But before all that, there would be an enviable shakedown cruise through the Greek islands, around Italy and Sicily, past Spain’s Balearic Islands and then to Gibraltar.

“It is a long-awaited dream of mine and Claudia’s,” Michael said, adding that the dream includes cruising from Canada down the U.S. Eastern Seaboard to the Bahamas and Caribbean. “Bering told us that the yachts they build would be capable of such a journey, but now it is time to test our boat in practice, extensively, over a minimum of 12 months, to see whether it will actually be able to do so.”

As well as a popular resort destination and a place so steeped in history that the Ancient Greeks are seen as latecomers to the party, the area around Antalya on the southern coast of Turkey is a free-trade zone. This low-wage, low-tax, low-regulation honeypot has drawn in all sorts of investors in the last 20 years or so, both foreign and home-grown, and as a result Antalya’s fenced-off, state-within-a-state has become a yacht-building mecca, attracting the full industry spectrum from blue-chip Dutch shipyards to small local firms building RIBs and runabouts.

Alexei Mikhailov set up Bering Yachts in 2007, building several yachts in China before alighting on Antalya, where the firm currently has no fewer than 14 vessels under construction, from a 65-footer to a 145, including five of Bering’s semicustom 80s. The company name is not just aspirational: the 59-year-old entrepreneur was brought up in Magadan, in Russia’s far east, just across the Kamchatka Peninsula from the Bering Sea.

Although Bering’s focus is on semi-custom designs, especially with its 80 and 75, the Datzers’ 76 is a custom one-off with expanded fuel capacity and a unique layout. The yacht originally was ordered by a customer in Florida who dropped out during the pandemic. By the time Michael and Claudia signed on, construction of the 76’s hull and superstructure were well underway, sized to fit on that original Florida dock. That’s why the boat is narrower than Bering’s more typically beamy craft.

Lemanjá’s lower-deck layout includes a full-beam amidships master stateroom, a VIP in the bow, and a double-berth stateroom to port. Headroom throughout is 6 feet, 8 inches or better, and there’s a stateroom-size pantry to starboard with enough lockers, fridges and freezers to support life on board for months. Battery capacity is similarly generous: enough for 12 hours at anchor without using the generators, according to Michael. There are solar panels too.

The main deck is one expansive entertaining space, with a dining table, seating and an open-plan galley. Up one level, the wheelhouse has good all-around visibility, and the sky lounge connects to the aft deck for relaxation.

As we cruised along the Turkish coast, I got to know Michael, who is an experienced, hands-on owner. He followed Lemanjá’s build closely, In real life, he’s a retired IT guy from Munich, which means he’s smart enough to know what he doesn’t know. He hired a German surveyor for the build. No yacht of this complexity was ever going to emerge from a shed without a few snags, but he said that to date, the yard had handled every noted flaw efficiently and with a smile.

The hull is built of AH36 structural steel with 8-mm plates on the bottom and 6-mm thickness on the sides. The superstructure is 6-mm aluminum. On the surveyor’s recommendation, an extra 21,000 pounds of ballast was added low in the hull; Michael said it has made a significant difference in the boat’s stability.

With full tanks, Lemanjá displaces more than 145 tons. Underway on the calm sea, she seemed to cruise in silence as I sat in the elevated wheelhouse. My decibel meter barely registered 47, even at maximum rpm. That’s quieter than a household refrigerator.

The 76’s twin 400-hp, continuous-rated Cummins diesels are beneath a tread-plate sole in a two-tier machinery space, mounted low in the skegs that are a distinctive feature of Bering’s hulls. With a fairly plumb stem and a bulb bow, the design’s theoretical displacement speed of around 11.4 knots was pretty much exactly where Lemanjá topped out at 2000 rpm, when she was burning around 39 gallons per hour. At 1250 rpm and 8.6 knots, consumption was just over 9 gph—which, allowing for a 10 percent reserve, equates to a cruising range of around 5,000 nautical miles. At a “fast” cruise of 1500 rpm and 9.4 knots, she consumed around 16.6 gph.

Michael emailed me a few weeks later from Greece to say they had been burning about 13 gph, excluding generators, while averaging 8.8 knots in rough conditions. “However,” he added, “we will have to observe the consumption over a longer period of time to be able to make more precise statements.” On a long passage with at least 4-foot swells and a 20-knot breeze, he said, Lemanjá was “amazingly and unexpectedly gentle, good-natured and stable.” With the waves on the beam, he and Claudia considered activating the Seakeeper for stabilization, “but then we didn’t, simply to gain experience.” The roll was bearable, and the autopilot held a steady course.

Lemanjá had a tendency to yaw with seas astern, he said, so he steered manually to keep control. “However,” he added, “this part of the trip only lasted about 15 minutes, and it is quite possible that there was a strong ground current at this point, which may have had an additional negative effect.”

And so it goes as the couple’s dream journey continues.