Best sandy beach - **Tower Beach ** at Hilton Head, SC. The whole east side of the island is 16 miles of one long, flat sandy beach, great for laying out, swimming, body surfing and/or walking.
Best snorkeling beach - **Big Beach ** - Makena, HI (Maui)
Best beach at sunset -** Waikiki Beach** - Oahu, HI though I haven’t met a beach that I didn’t love at sunset
Best beach all around - Ka’anapali Beach - Maui, HI
Best natural beauty - a beach whose name I’ve forgotten (it’s near a light house) on Bermuda
Best body surfing beach - **Hamoa Beach ** - Maui, HI
Best people watching beach - Ho’okipa Beach (near Paia) - Maui, HI - I could watch the wind surfers all day.
Pfft. Yeah, I suppose that if Hawaii is all you’ve got to choose from, then those are the beaches you’re stuck with. :rolleyes:
A few years back, I was seriously considering moving there. I told a postal worker about it. He said “I could never live there. You can’t even drive 20 miles without running into a beach.” Dude, what’s your point?
I’d like to go to Hawaii. I imagine it to be beautiful but very odd, for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on, but I’d like to find out if I’m right!
I adore the beach at Fort Jefferson National Park, in the Dry Tortugas. Beautiful (if tiny) beach, gorgeous clear water, great snorkeling. It’s about a two-hour ferry ride from Key West, usually relatively uncrowded, and I highly recommend camping there for the night, if you can!
Most rawest beach - We went to a beach on the Puna side of the big island of Hawaii which had only been created by lava about a year before. This was just before Kalapana got covered over. The waves had only pounded the lava rock down into large grain sand. It was very narrow since the waves were still in the process of knocking down the cooled lava flow. What really got to me was the blackness of everything everywhere. No life was growing just pitch black lava and the pounding sea.
Sounds like Fern Forest and I have similar tastes in beaches. Give me an isolated, rugged coastline filled with geological phenomena over a classic white sand beach to which the tourists have flocked any day. (Parking? Who the hell cares about parking, when no one else is around anyway?)
On Hawaii’s Big Island, Hapuna Beach is a favorite of people looking for the classic beach experience. The water is turquoise, parking is ample (though often almost full), sand is white, waves vary but are often just right.
Me, I prefer a little beach near Hilo, Hawaii that only the locals know about. It is black sand, rugged, and I don’t even go in the water there because the waves are usually too fierce for my taste (though you usually see locals body surfing there). But … talk about a dazzlingly beautiful experience. Last year a monk seal gave birth there, and lay on the beach for weeks with her baby seal! That was AWESOME. Also, the beach is a great place to look for sea glass, and there is also a lot of green slag dating back to the sugar mill days.
My favorite beach is in a nature preserve in Hampton VA, on the Chesapeake Bay.
I like it because it’s primitive, ungroomed, and 0 amenites you have listed. It was the one place I could go to get away from people and be by myself for a couple hours.
I’ve since moved away from Hampton. I don’t miss the city, but I do miss that beach.
The whole discussion pretty much begins and ends in Hawaii for me.
At least near Kona, there are so many beaches where you need to walk about a mile to get to, and because of that, you’re pretty much the only person there.
Best waves in Hawaii.
Best water.
Best sand.
Best snorkeling.
Most interesting geographically.
I’ve been on a beach in Kauai that was unbelievable.
Eastern US, they’re pretty much all the same. . .Va Beach, OC MD, OC NJ, LBI NJ, Rehoboth. . .I love going, don’t get me wrong. But, similar waves, restaurants, parking, etc. Of all of the bhe east coast beaches, I like OC NJ the best. It’s less developed, commercially speaking (at least there aren’t many giant hotels blocking the sun).
It is a little odd. You can go from a touristy area to a place where you’re the only one around within one hour’s drive. There are something like 8 unique eco-systems (rain forest, desert, mountain, deciduous forest) all contained on Maui. You can go from 40 degrees to 85 degrees in a few hours.
You think ocean, most people think swimming, but very little swimming is actually done outside of swimming pools. There’s just too much lava and the bottom isn’t great for walking bare-footed. There are relatively few harbours because deep water access is rare due to the lava, And I never saw any fishing boats, etc.
You are in the United States, but only politically speaking. Geographically and socially, you’re in another world.
Netitishi Point, because it is in the middle of nowhere (bottom on the Arctic Ocean’s Hudson’s Bay/James Bay), and the tide goes out for about a dozen kilometers: Lower James Bay Netetishi Point Photographs
I like one our local beaches called Silver Sands - miles and miles of white beach, you can drive along it, very few people know where it is. You have to be careful of the sharks though - they do tend to come around in summer.
The best snorkelling - off the coast of Vanuatu - just the most beautiful, unspoilt coral reefs. The water is like taking a warm bath, and it’s crystal clear…
The Hawaiian beaches are nice too.
I’ve only been to one, but it seems there are downsides;
-black sand gets HOT!
-it seems to stick to damp skin, moreso than white sand-and seems to sharper than white sand
-that said, black sand is dramatic looking-just wonder how many like to walk on it
