Snorkelling the Seychelles: From the Beach, or From a Boat?

You can snorkel here by walking into the sea from a beach, and you can snorkel by paying for a boat. Both are worth doing, they show you different things, and the usual advice – book a trip – skips the fact that some of the best water in the country is reachable on foot.

Here is the honest division of labour. Shore snorkelling gets you reef flats: shallow, calm, full of small fish, free apart from a park fee where one applies. Boat snorkelling gets you the granite pinnacles and offshore islets, which is where the bigger fish, the drop-offs and the photographs are, and which you cannot reach any other way.

From the beach: where it actually works

Not every beautiful beach is a snorkelling beach. What you want is a reef close in and shelter from whatever wind is blowing that week.

Anse Royale, south-east Mahé. Protected by its reef, shallow and calm, and the northern end of the beach holds the most fish. It is the easiest introduction on the island and is right beside the road.

Port Launay, north-west Mahé. Two beaches, Port Launay North and Port Launay South (Anse Islette), both flat and calm, and both inside a marine national park. This is the classic low-effort snorkel on Mahé.

Baie Ternay, at the western tip of Mahé. Also a marine national park, and the site plenty of regulars rate as the best in the inner islands – parrotfish, rays and turtles in a single outing is a realistic morning. Access is the catch: it is not a drive-up beach, which is why most people arrive by boat.

Anse Severe, northern La Digue. Reachable on foot or by bike from the ferry, and so the only one of the four spots here that needs neither a bus nor a hire car nor a boat, if you are on La Digue anyway. There is a lagoon to potter about in and an outer reef for anyone who wants more.

The fee, and how you pay it

Three of those sit inside marine national parks, and the Seychelles Parks and Gardens Authority charges non-residents above 12 years:

• Port Launay / Baie Ternay – SCR 200
• Sainte Anne Marine National Park – SCR 200
• Curieuse Marine National Park – SCR 300

Payment on site is by debit or credit card only. There is no cash window. Tickets can also be bought online beforehand, which is the simpler option if you are going early.

From a boat: what it buys you

The thing you are paying for is St Pierre – the granite islet off Praslin that appears in most photographs of Seychelles snorkelling – along with the islets of the Sainte Anne park and the reefs off Curieuse. None of them have a beach you can walk from.

The cheapest way in is the Curieuse and St Pierre half-day snorkelling trip, four hours at €46.53, 4.6 stars from 155 reviews, which drops the barbecue lunch and keeps the water. The full day with the barbecue, the most-reviewed trip in the whole inventory, is €79 with 4.9 stars from 1,808 reviews.

From Mahé rather than Praslin, the four-hour morning trip into the Sainte Anne marine park is €133, 4.9 stars from 77 reviews. The price gap to the Praslin trips is not a quality gap – it is the distance from Mahé to the good water, and it repeats across this whole site. Where you sleep decides what a day out costs. The comparison in full is on the snorkelling page, 35 listings from €46.53, and the Curieuse and St Pierre guide covers the variants.

Which months, and why it matters more than the site

Wind stirs the shallows, and stirred shallows are cloudy shallows. The two windows when the water settles are April to May and late September to November, between the two wind seasons, and on a good day visibility runs to about 30 metres.

During the south-east trades, from May to September, the sheltered water is on the north-west side; during the north-west monsoon, from December to March, it is the other way round. Picking the right coast for the week beats picking the famous site. The seasonal detail is here.

What the reef actually looks like now

This deserves saying plainly, because the brochures do not. The inner-island reefs lost over 90% of their live coral in the 1998 bleaching event, and a further major bleaching hit in 2016. Recovery has been real but uneven, and it has been faster after 2016 than after 1998 – some sites that had become algae-dominated are turning back towards coral.

What that means in the water: expect plenty of fish, and expect coral that ranges from genuinely good to visibly damaged depending on the site. Anyone who tells you the Seychelles reefs are pristine has not been in them. They are, however, very much alive, and the marine parks are where the difference shows.

Practical things worth having settled

Bring your own mask if you have one. Rental gear on a boat is included and adequate; a mask that fits your own face is the difference between forty minutes in the water and ten.

Look at what is included before you pay. Whether the park fee is in the ticket price varies by operator – that is the most common surprise at the jetty, and it is one line on the booking page.

Nobody is watching you on a beach. Shore snorkelling means no lifeguard, no boat cover and no one counting heads. Go in with someone, stay inside the reef, and keep clear of channels where water is visibly moving out. On the boat trips the crew does count heads, which is a real argument for booking one the first time.

Do not stand on the coral. It is not decoration, and on reefs recovering from two bleaching events it is the part that has taken the worst of it since 1998.

Short answer

If you are on La Digue, walk to Anse Severe and save the money. If you are on Mahé with a car or a bus card, Anse Royale and Port Launay are an afternoon each. If you want St Pierre – and most people, having seen a picture of it, do – that is a boat, and the half-day from Praslin at €46.53 is the least expensive way anyone gets there.