Legally blind Petoskey man takes on scuba diving

By Rachel Brougham

Throughout his 55 years, Peter Gillard of Petoskey has lived life to the fullest.

"He's never let things slow him down," said Amy Gillard, one of Peter's two sisters. "There are things he knows he can't do, things he knows he'll never be able to do, but from an attitude standpoint, he just plows through."

With only partial sight in his right eye, Gillard has been legally blind since birth.

"Never does Peter lay in bed and say to himself, 'Life isn't fair and I'm not getting up today,' said Peter's sister, Lisa Blanchard. "Everything he's ever loved in his life he needs good eyes for, and he's never been crabby about it. He just says to himself that this is his life and this is how I'm going to live it."

Facing challenges head on -- for Peter, that's what life is all about.

So when he told his family he was going to take up scuba diving, an activity that challenges even those with perfect vision, they had no doubt he would succeed.

"I said 'Go Peter,'" Lisa exclaimed. "I knew he would do it."

"You can call it a 35 year goal of mine," Peter Gillard said. "Learning to scuba dive had been in the back of my mind as something I wanted to do some day. So when I saw the movie, 'The Bucket List,' I knew I had to do it."

In January of 2010, while preparing for a family vacation to Hawaii, Gillard decided it was time to test the waters.

"I went to Hawaii with my sister Amy and my mom and we had an old neighbor who now lives out there and she had started a diving company," Gillard explained. "She had me practice in a pool and then we went into a lagoon in the ocean. I saw a turtle and several types of fish and I thought it was pretty neat. I knew I had to take it to the next level."

When Gillard returned home, he scoured the Internet for local scuba instructors and classes and came across Murray Kilgour of Charlevoix.

Kilgour, a certified diving instructor with more than 1,600 dives under his belt, was apprehensive about working with Peter at first.

"I've worked with people with limited vision in the past, but not to the extent of Peter's," Kilgour said. "My first instinct was to refer him to someone else, but then I got thinking about it and realized that even if I lost a good portion of my vision, I'd still want to dive."

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