Shocked fishermen rescue 38 dogs they found wading in lake

Two friends who expected to spend a day fishing together ended up embarking on a full-scale rescue mission after spotting 38 dogs wading through the lake.

Bob Gist, 61, of Arkansas, had planned to meet his friend Brad Carlisle of Tennessee after they hadn’t seen each other in some time, Gist told Fox News..

The couple headed to Grenada Lake in Mississippi and, along with Jordan Chrestman, a local fishing guide, the group got out on the water to spend some time fishing.

After a few hours without much luck with where they were, the group moved to another location, where things took a weird turn.

While they may have hoped to reap a lot of catch from their trip, they ended up walking away with a huge catch – but instead of fishing, they ended up with a total of 38 dogs.

“We go 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 noticed a number of dogs were in the water and asked the two friends if they could go check on them.

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

“We’re just flabbergasted because there are dogs everywhere, and they’re all going in different directions because they can’t see the shoreline on either side,” Gist told Fox News..

“And they are all hunting dogs – we can see that clearly because they are wearing expensive GPS radio collars.”

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

The three men, without hesitation, immediately jumped into action and fished them 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 swamped with wet dogs, but they were quickly overwhelmed and had to deposit the first batch of dogs at the bank, the outlet reported.

Chrestman managed to catch between 25 and 27 dogs initially, and Gist told the outlet that once they reached the bank, their owners were there, panicking.

After going out to retrieve the remaining dogs, another man on land said he had a GPS tracker for the dogs and asked to join their rescue mission.

The tracker was able to locate about three to four other dogs, Gist said, adding that they “were about to drown because they had been treading water for an hour.”

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

Gist told Fox News that when they “came back to the ramp with that last group of dogs… (and) we had to get them off the boat because they wouldn’t get off our boat. They were afraid to go back in the water. It was terrible.”

Gist told the outlet that Chrestman was the real hero of the dog’s rescue, saying the owners even tried to give him money for his quick thinking, but he refused.