Fishermen Rescue 38 Dogs from Mississippi Lake

A pair of fishermen and a Mississippi fishing guide were surprised out on the water when they were confronted with 38 dogs in danger of drowning.

Bob Gist, of Arkansas, and his friend Brad Carlisle of Tennessee were on a fishing trip together down on Grenada Lake when it unexpectedly turned into a rescue mission, they told Fox News. 

After boating out onto the water with local guide Jordan Chrestman in the early morning hours, they had to move to a different location because they were not having any luck. 

“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, 61, said. “Pretty soon we saw some dogs on the horizon in the water.”

Chrestman noted that the pack of dogs appeared to be after a deer that had also gotten into the water, but something was not right. 

“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,'” Gist recalled.

Once the three men directed their boat over to the scene, they realized how chaotic it truly was. 

“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 said.

“And they’re all hunting dogs —  we can clearly see that because they have expensive GPS radio collars on them.”

It turned out that the canines had been participating in an annual fox run that takes place in the Grenada area, but they were not meant to be out treading water for that long. 

The men began pulling the dogs onto the boat “without hesitation” so they wouldn’t drown,” Fox News reported. 

“We just immediately started calling dogs on the boat, you know, grabbed their collar and put them in the boat,” said Gist.

Chrestman was able to fill the boat with more than two dozen pups before bringing them to shore. 

Upon arriving at the bank, the fisherman reportedly found the dogs’ owners in a “panic.”

After retrieving a second group of dogs from the lake, one of the men on land offered to help the rescuers track down another group of three to four dogs with a GPS device. 

The tracker led the men to the last group of dogs, who were estimated to have been more than a mile from shore. 

“They were on the verge of drowning, because now they have been treading water for an hour,” Gist said. “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.”

According to Gist, Chrestman is the true hero of the story.

“If Brad and I had been there in a boat by ourselves, we wouldn’t have known anything was wrong, but that 20-something-year-old kid – I’m 61, so I’m calling him a kid – he knew something needed to be done,” Gist said.

While the owner of the hunting dogs attempted to pay Chrestman for his selfless work, he refused to take the money. 

“That kid had the presence of mind to know, ‘If we don’t do something, there’s going to be 38 dead dogs here.’ And he saved them, I mean we all pulled them in, but that kid is the hero here,” Gist added.

Gist, a State Farm insurance agent, posted a photo of a bunch of dogs in the boat with the caption, “Like a Good Neighbor Bob Gist was there!”