Easiest Shore Dive in Maui: Ulua Beach

If you are looking for the easiest, most accessible, and well set-up spot for shore diving in Maui, look no further than Ulua Beach. Located just before the shops of Wailea, it is a short drive from the scuba shops in Kihei. I would suggest Maui Dreams as they have the cheapest tank rentals on the island. It has been a long time since I dove Ulua Beach. For some reason it didn't impress me much early in my Maui diving career and I just always went to other places over it after that. But with time for one dive left before heading back to Vermont, Heidi and I decided to give it a try. And I'm so glad we did. The set-up for shore diving here is some of the best in Maui. There are multiple showers, a bathroom, and even a couple of benches with tank holding spots near the car drop-off spot. You can drop everything off there and then head back a few hundred feet for parking. The walk down to the beach is very easy, and just like that you are wading out into the calm waters over a very sandy bottom. This is a pretty shallow dive, following the rocky outcropping to the right of Ulua Beach. The coral is thriving here and forms a very dense reef. We were hoping to find frogfish and harlequin shrimp, but despite our best search, we came up empty. Yet the dive still felt like a huge success. We saw tons of fish, a few turtles, and tons of nudibranchs. Red spotted and gold lace nudibranchs really stole the show. We stayed underwater for about an hour and fifteen minutes, but I could have stayed for another hour easily. Now that we know how easy Ulua is to dive, it won't take us another decade to come back like this time.  *Trembling Nudibranch*   *Gold lace nudibranch*  *Red spotted nudibranch*       *Close up of a purple pin cushion sea star*  *Red spotted nudibranch* [//]:# (!pinmapple 20.69093 lat -156.44387 long Ulua Beach Shore Dive d3scr) -Dai Mar