“He couldn’t do donuts like he did on the pier, but he stretched out his arms and yelled, ‘Mommy, mommy! I caught a fish!’”
Easton, now 7, has accompanied Whitfield on several fishing trips. Yellowfin Boats made Whitfield a 21-footer that can accommodate Easton’s wheelchair, so the so-called Snapper Master can get off the pier and out onto the open water. Whitfield says Easton was a bit nervous in the boat—until he landed his first fish.
“I saw his reaction—he was smiling and freaking out,” says Whitfield. “He couldn’t do donuts like he did on the pier, but he stretched out his arms and yelled, ‘Mommy, Mommy! I caught a fish!’ When they’re fishing, they’re not thinking about fighting their disease. They’re just worried about fighting the fish on the other end of the line.”
If you’d like to learn more about Chastenation and support Whitfield’s mission to help disabled children learn to fish, visit chastenwhitfield.com or follow @chastenation on Instagram.
Meanwhile, Whitfield learned to fish from her mother (her father never even ate fish before they married). The Whitfield women always fished the salt water in their backyard, just north of Sarasota. When Whitfield was 12, her mother encouraged her to skip cheerleading camp competition and enter a fishing tournament. She won—and promptly gave the $500 in prize money back to the sponsoring Florida Children’s Burn Camp.
But being the only girl in middle school who had put down her pompoms and picked up a fishing pole wasn’t easy. She was pushed around in the halls and called names. Whitfield would go home, finish her homework and then run outside and jump in the family boat to cast her line and escape.
“Some people drink and take drugs to get away from reality,” says Whitfield. “My drug is fishing. It takes my mind off everything.”
Eventually, Whitfield recruited a couple of her former cheerleading teammates and started an all-girls fishing team that cleaned up at area tournaments. Around the time they began to get sponsors and gear from big-time sporting goods companies, the other kids stopped laughing at her.
Today, Whitfield is heading into her sophomore year at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), where she studies film and TV. She hopes to use that education to one day host her own fishing show on TV or YouTube, or to script and shoot commercials for fishing companies. She still seizes every spare moment to get out on the water.
“Some people drink and take drugs to get away from reality,” says Whitfield. “My drug is fishing. It takes my mind off of everything.”
Chasten Whitfield was 16 years old when she realized that fishing could help children with disabilities. She was at a fishing camp off the Gulf Coast of her native Florida when she met a boy named Easton. He was 5 years old and living with spina bifida. At first, he was afraid to even roll his wheelchair out onto the wooden pier. But when he finally did inch out over the water and cast a line, he was the only angler pulling in fish—big mangrove snappers that were the envy of all the other campers.
“He was so excited, he started doing donuts in his wheelchair on the pier,” says Whitfield. “I thought to myself, ‘I’m done. This is what I want to do for the rest of my life.’”
That same year, Whitfield started Chastenation, a nonprofit organization of local anglers who travel around Florida teaching fishing skills to children of all ages. In particular, they focus on taking children with serious illnesses and disabilities out on the water, where they can relax, find acceptance, and focus on something other than doctors and treatments.
Chastenation is a natural coupling of Whitfield’s two lifelong passions: fishing and philanthropy.
The latter began at age 7. After seeing photographs of children suffering in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Whitfield took her piggy bank to her mom and told her she wanted to give all her money to those babies on TV. They went to the Red Cross, and the organization accepted young Whitfield’s pennies. Later, Whitfield raised $9,000 for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital through yard sales and lemonade stands.
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