Amelia Neath
Sat, June 22, 2024
Shocked fishermen rescue 38 dogs they find treading water in Mississippi lake
Two friends who were expecting to spend a day together on a fishing trip ended up embarking on a fully-blown rescue mission after they spotted 38 dogs treading water in the lake.
Bob Gist, 61, from Arkansas had planned on meeting up with his friend Brad Carlisle from Tennessee after they had not seen each other for some time, Gist told Fox News.
The pair headed to Grenada Lake in Mississippi, and along with Jordan Chrestman, a local fishing guide, the party went out on the water to spend time fishing.
After a few hours of not finding much luck with the spot they were in, the group moved to a different location, where things took a bizarre turn.
While they may have been hoping for a successful bounty of catches from their trip, they ended up coming away with a huge haul – but instead of fish, they wound up with a total of 38 dogs.
"We go about a half mile or so from where we were to another place and we start fishing, and pretty soon we can hear some dogs barking," Gist told the outlet.
More than 30 dogs had rushed into the water in pursuit of a stag (Bob Gist)
The group continued to fish for about 10 or 15 minutes until Chrestman realized that a number of dogs were way out in the water and asked the two friends if it was okay to go over and check on them.
Once they arrived in the canine-infested waters, the three men were stunned to see the sheer number of dogs stuck out in the lake.
"We’re just flabbergasted because it’s dogs everywhere, and they’re all going in different directions because they can no longer see the bank on either side," Gist told Fox News.
The three men grabbed the exhausted dogs by their collars and dragged them into their boat (Bob Gist)
"And they’re all hunting dogs — we can clearly see that because they have expensive GPS radio collars on them.”
The group later learned that the hounds were part of an annual fox run that was taking place nearby, and Chrestman explained that he spotted a deer in the water that appeared to attract the dogs into the lake after they were chasing it, the outlet reported.
The three men, without hesitation, immediately took action and fished them out of the water by grabbing their collars and calling them, encouraging them onto their vessel.
They grabbed as many as they could until the boat was swarmed with the wet dogs, but they soon became overwhelmed and had to deposit the first round of hounds to the bank, the outlet said.
Chrestman managed to grab 25 to 27 dogs at first, and Gist told the outlet that once they reached the bank, their owners were there in a panic.
After they went out to grab the remaining dogs, another man on land said he had a GPS tracker for the dogs and asked to join their rescue mission.
Bob Gist said he and his companions were ‘flabbergasted’ by what they found (Bob Gist)
The tracker was able to locate around three to four more dogs, Gist explained, saying they “were on the verge of drowning, because now they have been treading water for an hour.”
In the end, a total of 38 dogs were rescued out of Grenada Lake.
Gist told Fox Newsthat when they "got back over to the ramp with that last bunch of dogs… [and] we were having to drag them out of the boat because they didn’t want to get out of our boat. They were scared they were going back to the water. It was terrible."
Gist explained to the outlet that Chrestman was the true hero of the dog rescue, saying that the owners even tried to give him money for his quick thinking, but he turned it down.
38 dogs were close to drowning on a Mississippi lake. But some fishermen had quite a catch
Jeff Martin
Fri, June 21, 2024 at 2:22 p.m. MDT·2 min read
ATLANTA (AP) — By the time fishermen spotted the first head bobbing above the water, the 38 dogs were exhausted and struggling to stay alive.
The hound dogs had plunged into a large Mississippi lake while chasing a deer, a diversion during a fox hunt. Bob Gist, who was fishing on the lake, knew they had no chance.
“A deer can swim the Mississippi River, and those dogs are not going to catch a deer in the water,” he recalled Friday.
They weren't going to survive, either, Gist and the others realized — unless someone acted right away. The insurance agent from Jonesboro, Arkansas, along with friend Brad Carlisle and guide Jordan Chrestman, headed over in their small boat.
“There were dogs everywhere,” Gist said. “They were kind of swimming in circles and didn’t know which direction to go."
As the dogs' frantic owners watched from the shore, the three men started grabbing whatever dogs they could. There were too many to all fit on the bass boat, so three trips to shore were needed.
A photo Gist took during the rescue shows Carlisle standing and grinning in mirrored sunglasses, with more than a half-dozen of the hound dogs perched on the bow. Numbers from the fox hunt are painted on their sides.
Other dogs are standing behind the seats — two of them calmly looking ahead as Chrestman, beside them, steers.
"The hero here is Jordan," Gist said, as the guide had recognized the danger and sped the boat over. “If it wasn’t for Jordan, there would have been 38 dead dogs."
The dogs had probably been in the water for about 15 or 20 minutes by then, Gist said. Some of them were so worn out that the men had to reach into the water and lift their heads out. Each dog was then heaved aboard.
By the time the last were rescued, they had been in the water for 45 minutes to an hour, Gist said.
Dogs, especially when hunting, can “follow game relentlessly, as in this case,” said Chris Gurner, a natural resource specialist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which patrols Grenada Lake — but he called it rare for them to go that far from shore. Even though they were on a fox hunt, it’s not unusual for the dogs to go after any animal that startled them, he said.
“Opportunities to help somebody are in front of us all the time,” Gist said. “Sometimes if you see something, do something.”
Jeff Martin, The Associated Press
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