A single Porites brain coral in the Blue Bay lagoon is estimated at close to a thousand years old. It sits inside 353 hectares of protected water, gazetted as Blue Bay Marine Park in 2000 and inscribed as a Ramsar wetland of international importance in 2008.
The route a blue bay snorkeling & cocktails 3 islands speedboat tour follows is therefore a legal reserve rather than open sea. Anchoring is restricted to fixed buoys. Fishing is licensed. The visibility snorkellers describe is a managed condition, held in place by patrol and permit.
Mahébourg lies two kilometres north, laid out in 1805 and named for Bertrand-François Mahé de La Bourdonnais. Offshore, Île de la Passe and Île aux Fouquets flank the single navigable break in the barrier reef. In August 1810 that channel decided the Battle of Grand Port, the only French naval victory over Britain carved into the Arc de Triomphe. The lighthouse raised on Île aux Fouquets in 1864 still stands, roofless, above its rain cistern. Ruined gun emplacements face the same water that swimmers now cross.
The islets differ from one another sharply. Île aux Aigrettes, 26 hectares of raised coralline limestone, holds the last stand of Mauritian dry coastal ebony forest and has been managed as a nature reserve by the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation since 1985; pink pigeons and Aldabra giant tortoises live there under supervision. Île des Deux Cocos carries a Moorish-influenced villa commissioned around 1920 by the British governor Sir Hesketh Bell. Île aux Cerfs, further up the east coast, is a sand-rimmed shelf lying inside its own lagoon. Mauritius island-hopping excursions string these together because each one answers a different question about the place.
What holds the whole system in shape is the reef. The barrier breaks Indian Ocean swell before it reaches the shallows, producing a lagoon that rarely exceeds four metres over the coral gardens and stays near 25 degrees through the southern winter. Staghorn and table corals recovered slowly after the 2020 Wakashio grounding off Pointe d'Esny, monitored since by government and university survey teams. Entry to the beach itself remains free at 0 MUR, which is one reason blue bay snorkeling & cocktails 3 islands speedboat tour tours push off from public sand rather than a gated marina. Blue Bay lagoon boat trips are, in that sense, an old arrangement: local skippers, an open shoreline, and a reef that has been counted, mapped and defended for a quarter of a century.
8 hr
