  We present the Census of the Local Universe (CLU) narrow-band survey to
search for emission-line (\ha) galaxies. CLU-\ha~has imaged $\approx$3$\pi$ of
the sky (26,470~deg$^2$) with 4 narrow-band filters that probe a distance out
to 200~Mpc. We have obtained spectroscopic follow-up for galaxy candidates in
14 preliminary fields (101.6~deg$^2$) to characterize the limits and
completeness of the survey. In these preliminary fields, CLU can identify
emission lines down to an \ha~flux limit of
$10^{-14}$~$\rm{erg~s^{-1}~cm^{-2}}$ at 90\% completeness, and recovers 83\%
(67\%) of the \ha~flux from catalogued galaxies in our search volume at the
$\Sigma$=2.5 ($\Sigma$=5) color excess levels. The contamination from galaxies
with no emission lines is 61\% (12\%) for $\Sigma$=2.5 ($\Sigma$=5). Also, in
the regions of overlap between our preliminary fields and previous
emission-line surveys, we recover the majority of the galaxies found in
previous surveys and identify an additional $\approx$300 galaxies. In total, we
find 90 galaxies with no previous distance information, several of which are
interesting objects: 7 blue compact dwarfs, 1 green pea, and a Seyfert galaxy;
we also identified a known planetary nebula. These objects show that the
CLU-\ha~survey can be a discovery machine for objects in our own Galaxy and
extreme galaxies out to intermediate redshifts. However, the majority of the
CLU-\ha~galaxies identified in this work show properties consistent with normal
star-forming galaxies. CLU-\ha~galaxies with new redshifts will be added to
existing galaxy catalogs to focus the search for the electromagnetic
counterpart to gravitational wave events.
