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 real-life rescue mission after spotting 38 dogs walking through the water in a Mississippi lake.

Bob Gist, 61, from Arkansas, had planned to meet his friend Brad Carlisle from Tennessee after they hadn’t hung out together for a while, Gist told Fox News.. The couple traveled to Grenada Lake, Mississippi, with local fishing guide Jordan Chrestman to catch a big catch.

After a few lucky hours, the group moved to another location, where things took a weird turn. While they may have been hoping for a good harvest of fish, they ended up walking away with a huge catch of 38 dogs.

“We walk about a half-mile from where we were to another place and we start fishing, and pretty soon we can hear dogs barking,” Gist told the news outlet.

The group continued fishing for about 10 or 15 minutes until Chrestman realized a number of dogs were in the water and asked the two friends if they could keep an eye on them.

Once they arrived in the puppy-infested waters, the three men were stunned to see the large number of dogs in the lake.

“We’re just stunned because there are dogs everywhere, and they’re all going in different directions because they can’t see the shore on one side or the other anymore,” Gist told Fox News .. “And they are all hunting dogs – we can see that clearly because they have expensive GPS radio collars on them.”

The group later learned that the dogs were part of an annual fox race that took place nearby. Chrestman said he spotted a deer in the water that seemed to lure the dogs into the lake after they chased it, the outlet reported.

The three men, without hesitation, immediately jumped into action and fished the dogs out of the water by grabbing their collars and calling to them, encouraging them to get on their boat.

They caught as many as they could until the boat was overrun with wet dogs, but they were quickly overwhelmed and had to deposit the first set of dogs at the bank, the media outlet noted.

Chrestman managed to catch 25 to 27 dogs at first, and Gist told the outlet that once they got to the bank, their owners were panicked.

After they went out to collect the remaining dogs, another man on the ground said he had a GPS tracker for the dogs and asked to join their rescue mission.

The tracker located three or four other dogs, and Gist said they “were about to drown, because now they’ve been treading water for an hour.”

In the end, a total of 38 dogs were rescued from Lake Grenada.

Gist said that when they “came back to the ramp with this last bunch of dogs…(and) we had to drag them out of the boat because they wouldn’t come out of our boat.” return to the water. It was terrible.

Gist, nicknamed Chrestman, was the real hero of the rescue, saying the owners even tried to give him money for his quick thinking, but he refused.