  We present a study of 16 HI-detected galaxies found in 178 hours of
observations from Epoch 1 of the COSMOS HI Large Extragalactic Survey (CHILES).
We focus on two redshift ranges between 0.108 <= z <= 0.127 and 0.162 <= z <=
0.183 which are among the worst affected by radio frequency interference (RFI).
While this represents only 10% of the total frequency coverage and 18% of the
total expected time on source compared to what will be the full CHILES survey,
we demonstrate that our data reduction pipeline recovers high quality data even
in regions severely impacted by RFI. We report on our in-depth testing of an
automated spectral line source finder to produce HI total intensity maps which
we present side-by-side with significance maps to evaluate the reliability of
the morphology recovered by the source finder. We recommend that this become a
common place manner of presenting data from upcoming HI surveys of resolved
objects. We use the COSMOS 20k group catalogue, and we extract filamentary
structure using the topological DisPerSE algorithm to evaluate the \hi\
morphology in the context of both local and large-scale environments and we
discuss the shortcomings of both methods. Many of the detections show disturbed
HI morphologies suggesting they have undergone a recent interaction which is
not evident from deep optical imaging alone. Overall, the sample showcases the
broad range of ways in which galaxies interact with their environment. This is
a first look at the population of galaxies and their local and large-scale
environments observed in HI by CHILES at redshifts beyond the z=0.1 Universe.

Astrophysics of Galaxies