Two friends and a fishing guide turned a relaxing day on the water, attempting to catch some fish, into a heroic and heartwarming rescue of 38 dogs that were close to drowning. The simultaneously heartwarming and tragic incident occurred on Mississippi’s Grenada Lake, where they were attempting to catch some fish and instead saved some dogs.
The men involved were Bob Gist, who is a 61-year-old State Farm agent from Arkansas, and his friend and fellow State Farm agent from Tennessee, Brad Carlisle, and Grenada Lake local and fishing guide Jordan Chrestman. They headed out on the lake in the early hours of the morning but had no luck, so they motored off to a different part of the lake.
As they pulled into the new spot, they heard the curious sound of dogs barking. Arriving upon the scene, they saw the dogs and kept hearing the barking. Mr. Gist, speaking to Fox News Digital about the matter, said, “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.” He continued, “Pretty soon we saw some dogs on the horizon in the water.”
They had their lines in the water, but, when they realized that something was going on with the dogs, which were oddly still in the water and barking, and headed over to check in on them. Mr. Gist, explaining that, said, “We went on fishing for about 10 or 15 more minutes, and Jordan [Chrestman] said, ‘Hey guys, if you don’t mind, we really need to go check on those dogs because they’re way out there in that water.'”
What they found was even weirder than they expected: nearly forty dogs from a local fox hunt were deep in the water, spread all over a patch of the lake with no bank in sight. Mr. Gist, explaining that, said, “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.” He continued, “And they’re all hunting dogs — we can clearly see that because they have expensive GPS radio collars on them.”
Acting quickly, as the dogs were tiring out, the three men hounded the hounds into the boat. The called them, grabbed them by their collars, and hoisted them to safety in the fishing boat. “We just immediately started calling dogs on the boat, you know, grabbed their collar and put them in the [bass] boat,” Mr. Gist said.
They took the more than two dozen dogs they initially rescued to a nearby bank where, fortunately, they found the owner, who was deeply worried that the hounds, which had chased a deer out into the lake, weren’t ok. But, fortunately, they were there to rescue them. The owner, thankful for the dogs’ rescue, asked Mr. Gist and the others if, using the GPS data from the collars, they could help him rescue the remaining hounds.
They of course did so, getting to them just in time. “They were on the verge of drowning, because now they have been treading water for an hour,” Mr. Gist said. He continued, “We 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.”
Featured image credit: Bob Gist
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