Port du Niel, the slim harbor clinging to the Giens Peninsula's eastern shore, dispatches more sailings to Porquerolles than any quay on the Var coast. Its catamarans slip moorings every hour in high season, bound for an island that Napoleon III declared a military preserve in 1810, sparing it the villa sprawl that consumed much of the Riviera. Porquerolles remains three-quarters forested, its 1,254 hectares encircled by marine protection zones established in 1963 and strengthened under France's 2006 Marine Natural Park decree. The strait separating Giens from Porquerolles runs four kilometers at its narrowest point, a channel the Greeks called the Stœchades and the Romans fortified with signal towers whose limestone footings still mark the island's northern cape. Catamaran Hyères Porquerolles sailings favor twin-hulled vessels for their shallow draft and deck space, essential when crossing waters that shift from twenty-meter depths to three-meter sandbars within a cable's length. The Route des Îles, as captains call the corridor, threads past Fort de la Repentance, a star-shaped bastion completed in 1635 under Cardinal Richelieu's coastal defense program, and skirts the Petit Langoustier reef, where the seabed drops to kelp forests thick enough to slow an anchor chain. Most crossings angle toward Plage Notre-Dame, a crescent of silica sand on the island's north face, or Plage d'Argent, where wind-pruned Aleppo pines lean over clear water that holds eighteen degrees Celsius even in March. Snorkeling excursions anchor off these beaches, where posidonia meadows—listed under the EU Habitats Directive—shelter sea bream, octopus, and the occasional loggerhead turtle tracked by the Parc National's marine biologists. Hyères itself, the peninsula's parent commune, has provisioned island traffic since the Ligurian tribes paddled dugouts to Porquerolles for its freshwater springs. By the nineteenth century, the harbor supported sardine boats and coral divers; today it berths seventy-two commercial sailing permits, most held by family operators whose grandparents ran the same routes under canvas. The catamarans that dominate the modern fleet arrived in the 1990s, replacing monohulls too slow to complete the round trip within a tide window. Deck design has since standardized: trampolines strung between bows for sunbathing, aft swim platforms with stainless ladders, bimini canopies rigged on quick-release tracks. Skippers still hail weather updates over VHF channel sixteen and follow the same bearing Phoenician grain ships used—302 degrees magnetic from the harbor bell to the Porquerolles lighthouse. The coastal catamaran trade peaks between May and September, when mistral winds moderate and the Mediterranean warms past twenty-two degrees. Off-season sailings continue through October, favored by photographers for the slant light that turns the island's southern cliffs copper at four in the afternoon. UNESCO has proposed expanding the marine park's boundaries to include the seagrass beds west of Giens, a designation that would restrict anchoring zones but leave the primary catamaran routes unchanged. For now, the Port du Niel quay operates under its 1947 harbor ordinance, open daily from nine in the morning, its bollards worn smooth by seventy-five years of mooring line.