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Photo Courtesy : TravelAbility
Toby Willis
blind sailor , talks about acceptance and the power of the dog
By Nancy Baye
“ I may have lost my sight , but I haven ' t lost my vision . I have a vivid imagination ,” Toby Willis says as he describes his congenital sight loss . “ I inherited a genetic mutation , Leber ’ s disease , which began expressing when I was very young . I tried to hide it because of the stigma , the barriers that people place on people with disabilities . But by the time I was in junior high school it was unmistakable .” He did gene therapy , which restored only a bit of his sight — too much damage was already done to his retinas . That bit of residual vision helps
Toby ’ s outdoor adventures — and there are a lot of those . He loves travel and any outdoor adventures : hiking , back country treks , technical rock climbing and sailing .
Growing up near water , Toby grew to love swimming and boating . When he moved to Seattle , he made friends with an optometrist , who understood his sight loss . Toby expressed interest in his sailboat , admitting he knew nothing about sailing . He recalls their first day on the water . “ When my friend realized my phone had a compass with read aloud function , he said that if I could access a compass I could sail ! I fell in love with it — it ’ s fun and challenging and I ’ ve had this amazing teacher .” The phone software lets Toby connect to the boat ’ s instrumentation and get most data read aloud — the position of the boat , depth of the water , direction of travel . He can also operate the autopilot steering . “ We ’ ve sailed in many parts of the world . Navigating the locks of the Panama Canal beside 900-foot-long container ships was quite a pinnacle for me .”
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