Two anglers hooked an impressive haul. It just wasn't fish! A fisherman and his buddy came to the aid of 38 stranded, waterlogged dogs.
Bob Gist, a State Farm agent by day and fisherman in his free time, went on a fishing trip with his friend to Mississippi. They were fishing on Grenada Lake with a local tour guide. They didn't have much luck, so they decided to move to a different area. "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 said. "Pretty soon we saw some dogs on the horizon in the water."
It turns out there was an annual fox run in the area. The dogs were hunting dogs chasing game. They ended up chasing a deer into the water. "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 said.
However, all three were stunned by the number of dogs in the water.
"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."
Angler Saves Dogs
Realizing the dogs would drown without their intervention, the anglers sprung into action to help them. "We just immediately started calling dogs on the boat, you know, grabbed their collar and put them in the [bass] boat," Gist said. The grabbed as many dogs as they could. In total, they managed to gather 25 to 27 dogs onto the boat.
They found their owners on the banks calling out to the dogs. The anglers then went back to rescue another group of dogs. A hunter with GPS led them to three or four dogs further out from the bank.
"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."
Gist praised his friend as the true hero of the day.
"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. "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."
