Our friends and we canoed out to the lake during the day, just to hang out. Since most nice shorelines were privately owned (which is really unfortunate), we couldn’t just dock anywhere. After a while, we found a large rock standing in the middle of the water. It was a nice place to perch, chat, and take a dip. We had our lunch and beer with us, so we were psyched to find this place. We tied the canoes together with a rope, and wrapped it around the rock so the canoes would not drift away.

This, however, meant that the canoes constantly moved and hit each other and the rock. Canoes were made of metals and metal-hitting sound is one of those things of which Kaiju is very fearful.

We humans got in the water right next to the boat while Kaiju sat in it, and he was not cool with it. He was visibly shaken by being left alone in the boat that was banging against each other. Acknowledging this, we took him out of the boat and put him on the rock so he could sit with us. Unfortunately, he didn’t seem to feel any better. Soon enough, I caught him scoping out the distance to the nearest shore (there was a little peninsula with no trails nearby). He trembled, and no consoling seemed to help. Then, he jumped, from the rock into the water. He swam toward the shore as fast as he could.

Of course, Kaiju’s Hudad jumped in right away, swam over, and grabbed him. But we felt really bad to have pushed Kaiju far enough for him to decide to flee. We got back on the boat, pushed ourselves away the rock, and enjoyed our beer and sandwich on the floating boat while our friends had theirs on the rocks… Sigh.