Ka’anapali Beach is Maui’s big, famous resort beach, and it delivers the postcard: three miles of sand, a paved beachwalk behind it, Lana’i and Moloka’i stacked on the horizon, and Black Rock at the north end, where torches are lit and a diver leaps into the sea at every sunset. Come for a morning snorkel or the evening show; either way you get a real beach day with cold drinks twenty steps from your towel.
Black Rock: snorkeling and the sunset cliff dive
Pu’u Keka’a — Black Rock — is the lava headland at the beach’s north end, and it carries weight beyond the postcard: in Hawaiian tradition it is a leina, a place where spirits leap from this world into the next. Treat it with that respect and it hands you the two best moments on the beach, the morning snorkel and the evening ceremony.
Snorkeling first. The rock’s base drops into ten to twenty-five feet of clear water with reef fish, eels and steady green sea turtle traffic; mornings before the wind are best. Stay on the beach side of the point, because current can wrap the outside, and enter from the sand near the Sheraton end. It is the best easy snorkel on this stretch of coast, with Napili Bay up the road as its calmer sibling.
Then the ceremony. Every evening at sunset since 1963, a diver climbs Pu’u Keka’a lighting torches, offers a lei to the ocean and makes the roughly 35-foot leap — a tribute to Kahekili, the 18th-century Maui chief who proved his courage jumping from this exact rock. It lasts about ten minutes, costs nothing, and you watch from the public sand. Daytime tourists cliff-jump here too; if you must, watch where locals enter, check the depth and never go head-first.