The wind picks up - the moment Dani Salzmann has been waiting for all morning. Here on Lake Lucerne and especially in the bay off Lucerne, a good sailing wind is a rather rare phenomenon. But now it's time to get going, the slow sailing has come to an end. The foil sails are taking shape. The leeward float of the yellow trimaran tips down into the water. Salzmann, who is sitting on the windward hull, is lifted up into the water. The feet hanging from the float dangle 20 centimetres above the clear lake. The wake rushes.
"That's why I built the boat," says the 56-year-old, smiling with the corners of his mouth turned upwards. He is happy: the efforts of the past few years have paid off. The Lucerne native steers his yellow projectile past all the other keelboats over the short, steep waves with the two-and-a-half metre long tiller boom. The log repeatedly jumps to over ten knots.
The constantly weak wind on the lake on his doorstep is one of the reasons why Dani Salzmann decided to build the trimaran in the summer of 2011. "The light wind characteristics, the space on deck, the upright sailing," he lists, "and the fact that I already had a berth that the boat had to fit into," he says. The berth is not designed for multihulls, but only has the usual dimensions for a six-and-a-half metre monohull. "So it had to be a tri with a folding mechanism," explains Salzmann.
Today, he is sitting on the result of 1700 hours of work. A racing machine that is just as impressive as its construction is amazing: Salzmann sewed and glued the cat out of plywood. The construction plans cost just 100 euros.
Read the large portrait of a fascinating self-build in YACHT 17/14 - available now at newsagents.
