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Amélie Rocheleau, director of communications for Parc Nature Éco-Odyssée. Photo by Sofia Misenheimer /POSTMEDIA

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The day began with the only job my phone completed successfully, scanning my pre-booked ticket at check-in. Admission with gear is $45 a person and it had been easy to select my date and time on the website.

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A staff member handed me a laminated map to slot into the corded webbing at the nose of my paddleboard. On the back is an optional scavenger hunt for plastic animals hidden around the maze, intended to make paddlers look closely enough to spot the real ones.

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I was assigned the duck route, one of six animal-themed courses calibrated to a set duration. The duck takes about two hours, the staffer said.

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After check-in, my partner and I crossed a covered bridge — very Wakefield — to reach the docking area, buckled into life-jackets and pushed off into the green.

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Sofia Misenheimer on a paddleboard at Éco-Odyssée in Wakefield. Photo by Will Prince

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Thirty seconds after stepping onto my board, panic set in as the craft pitched beneath my feet. Staff remove the fins to keep the boards from snagging on weeds or submerged branches, so the tail can slide sideways when one stroke pulls harder than the other. I shortened my strokes while I found my equilibrium.

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Wayfinding took less concentration than staying upright. Plywood animals at 65 intersections are stamped with numbers, so my job was to follow the duck markers while the count climbed toward the exit. A few routes are ordered in reverse, so a family launching ahead of us in a pedal boat took the fish route to the right while my partner and I ducked left. The staggered courses let several parties wander the waterways with brief, if any, contact.

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In the early days of Éco-Odyssée, visitors faced a harder test. They carried a compass and field guide to decode directions like “Take Mallard Avenue” at intersections marked by different duck species. The park eventually replaced species identification with numbered animals as fewer visitors wanted to stop and consult the guide, a change Rocheleau linked to the arrival of smartphones.

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My board felt steadier by the third or fourth intersection. By the middle of the route, I could stand and kneel on autopilot, an improvement responsible for my only disaster of the afternoon.

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Riding a hand’s width above the waterline, my entire view became the labyrinth, which I imagine is how a beaver or duck sees it. Turtles tipped off deadfall into the water after basking in the sun. Long stretches passed where the loudest sound was chatting geese, a few groups, camouflaged along the banks.

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Hours in a marsh should have left me covered in bites, but the tally came to zero. Rocheleau credited the dragonflies and the birds, which snap up mosquitoes when they lift off the water. “They get eaten right away,” she said.

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While some stretches of maze are so clear you can reach down and touch the bottom, the final leg of the duck route crosses a deep and weedy basin. Along that corridor, feeling pleased with my steadiness, I stood up to stretch my legs and sent my phone, tucked into my life-jacket, on a short arc into the water beside me with a plonk.

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What followed amounted to an aquatic tragedy in three acts. My partner, who is six-foot-three, leapt off his board in the direction of the sinking device and attempted to feel for it with his legs, raising thick clouds of sediment in the process. He groped through slimy vegetation growing up from the bottom, unable to touch solid ground.

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Will attempts to magnet fish my phone from the bottom of the Éco-Odyssée marsh. Photo by Sofia Misenheimer /POSTMEDIA

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We rang the emergency number printed in a corner of our map. A staff member paddled out with a fishing magnet the size of my palm, attached to a long piece of twine. We dragged the magnet back and forth along the marsh bottom for half an hour, dredging up muck. A call to my number went straight to voicemail. The phone remained below, along with years of unbacked-up photos and data.