Electric Beach
a.k.a.    Kahe Point Beach Park
on Southwest Side
of O'ahu Island, Hawaii

Click here to see this divesite at www.ShoreDiving.com
(The photo below is theirs.)
Photo of Electric Beach, borrowed from ShoreDiving.com
electric beach map

Electric Beach   a.k.a. Kahe Point Beach Park

Recommendation:
Excellent dive for fun at any skill level, or for Open Water training dives 1 & 2.

Notes:
Depths top off at 33'/10m.  Visibility tops off at 40'/13m.  Low visibility and wave action near the entry/exit can make the entry a little challenging.  Strong artificial currents blowing madly out of a pair of underwater pipes provide a minor risk for beginners, and a LOT of fun for experienced divers.  Beware of sudden buddy separations because of those currents.
Divers here should definitely have dive booties and fins with heelbands, NOT simple slip-on no-separate-shoe fins.  If you have to walk barefoot in the very stony water near this beach, you will be extremely uncomfortable.  Faking it with rubber slippers won't help, because those suckers are extremely buoyant in water, and easily lost in the shallow rocky waters near shore.  Buoyant beach sandals are also a pain in the butt to carry during a dive, because their positive buoyancy really really bugs you.  So go with proper diveshoes.
Fun bits:
Sandy bottom, lots of lively coral heads, frequent fist-sized humpback cowry shells, frequent turtles, spotted eagle rays, long ribbonlike schools of imported (mid-50s) yellow snapper, pincushion starfish, and moray eels.

This is a PERFECT (i.e., <33' and clear water) divesite to take advantage of the FUJI Quicksnap (tm) snorkelling camera.  (Yes, I said "snorkelling".)  This cheap one-use lever-action 27-picture snorkelling camera says on the box "15 feet / 5 meters maximum depth", but in fact it can go as deep as 30' / 9m and still be fully funtional.  You can bring it as deep as 40, even 45' for a single photo, but don't try to wind the film forward at that depth, and you still may find that the film doesn't wind forward properly after a visit to that depth.  But... this dive site never exceeds 33' unless you bring a shovel, so the camera will always work perfectly.  Remember that its focal length starts about a yard/1m in front of the lens, and anything past 3 yards / 3m will be hopelessly blue-on-blue.  I don't think the camera comes with a flash option, though it'd be nice if it did.  You may be able to enhance moderate close-ups with a divelight, but it seems a long way to go for limited results.  Do NOT mix-and-match the brand and model, here.  The Kodak (tm) snorkelling camera, for example, carries the same "5 m / 15' maximum depth" warning on its box, but the shutter button is a simple rubber cup that works by compression... so if it goes much deeper than its rating, the water pressure simply holds the camera shutter-button down for the length of your stay at that depth.  Talk about a double-exposure...!  A Kodak will record almost your entire dive as a single large blur.

There may be other makes and models of snorkelling cameras that can safely be used as shallow SCUBA cameras, but I don't know what they are.  Write and tell me which ones are good AND bad, please.  My e-mail address is at the top and bottom of this page.
Dangerous bit:
Beware the underwater pipes carrying warm water at high speed away from the electric plant.If you're in front of them, stay VERY low.  If you're above or on either side of them, swim well away from the edges.  That current can easily and quickly carry you up from the bottom to the surface and toss you several hundred feet further out to sea.  This's particularly worrisome f you have trouble equalizing, or are worried about buddy separations.  On the other hand, if that's your idea of fun... it's a gas.  A total roller-coaster ride.  Pop goes the weasel, and welcome to the decompression chamber.* 

*(O'ahu has 17, including the Pacific's strongest, capable of creating pressures equal to several hundred feet under water.)
How to dive it:

1) Drive along the south-west shore of O'ahu, Hawaii.  This road is called the Farrington highway.  You'll be looking for a small park on the left side of the road and immediately after it a smallish white electric power plant on the right. (see the photo.)  Pull into the park and find a parking spot as far west (toward the power plant) as possible.
2) Post a guard on your vehicle.  No fooling: this is the bad side of town, and there are frequent car break-ins.  Sometimes there are homeless people camping in the parking lot, and sometimes the park's empty, but at all times your car is not safe if all your team members are underwater.  Break-ins are typically via a broken window or a very subtle and quick lock-punch from a screwdriver.  The car-watcher should sit IN the car, not nearby...with no bathroom-breaks or other reasons to look away for even a moment.  Give'em the car keys and a brown-bag lunch.
3) After that rough beginning, this turns into a dream dive.  There's a pay phone near the pavilion at the west end of the park.  Under the pavilion roof, you'll find benches to set up, and -- amazingly-- a water spigot for rinsing gear.  There's a 4-outlet outdoors shower and stinky bathrooms as well.  There are picnic tables nearby, but they're out in the sun, and you may find you sunburn very quickly on a Hawaiian island's arid, cloudless, desert-like Southwestern side.
4) Before unstowing gear, take your crew down to the beach behind the west side of the pavillion.  You can do your dive briefing there, and assess the conditions.  Notice how the narrow, shallow channel to the beach is a natural wave generator.  The waves can ride as high as chest-high, but still be easy to manage if you know how.  (Notes on that later.)  Notice also the patches of light blue and dark brown in front of the beach.  The light blue represents large sandy patches, and the dark brown is coral heads.  On the far side of the beach, notice a long brown stripe (two underwater pipes) running out from a concrete courtyard toward a frothy patch on the surface.  That frothy patch is an artificial rip current ejecting from the pipes at around 10 miles per hour.  It's a real force to be reckoned with, if you get caught in it. 

5)  Plan around that current.  You'll find that most divers will fall into one of 2 categories:  1) Their pupils will narrow to pencil-point-sharpener size, their breathing will get quick, and they'll think nasty things about buddy separation, sudden ascents without a safety stop, and ears popping madly.  Or, 2) their eyebrows will shoot up, their IQs will drop down, and they'll say "whooooaaaa... killer ride, dude !  Gotta do it !"  Be absolutely sure, if you have a mixed group, that the adrenalin junkies don't pressure the cautious divers into doing something un-fun.  Practice your dive briefing and the presentation of choices beforehand, so you know how to make people comfortable with airing their reservations.  I've seen too many divers' vacations ruined by the stress of being saddled with an overly or underly cautious buddy.  In short, make sure that when you have fun, it's everyone's idea having fun.
6) After checking the water and deciding on a dive plan, come back to the car and gear up, then lock up everything that's not getting wet in the car... including your guardman.  Then return to the beach.  As you're walking toward the beach,  your tanks should already be on and buddy-checked.  You should be fully geared up with 3 notable exceptions: 

a) if you're wearing a very hot full-body wetsuit, it's acceptable at this point to have it stripped down to the waist.  You can fully suit up in the shallow water when you're donning fins.

b) Put your mask into the footpocket of one of your fins.  This will leave your hands free.  You can put the mask on just before going in the water or even when you're in chest-high water ready to put your fins on.

c) Clip your fins' heelstraps into the upper chestclip of your BCD.  This will leave your fins where you can easily get them, but leave your hands free until it's your turn to put your fins on.
7)Walk carefully down the sandy path  to the beach.  Face the ocean, and chose an entry path roughly 2/3 of the way toward the concrete wall at the west side of the beach.  Go straight out from here, as this will give you the clearest path.  Near the far left & right edges, there are large unseen mosh-pit boulders and smaller anklebiters that can really bug you on the way in and out.
8) Judge the surf.  If the waves are fairly big, carefully count how many seconds ('one mississippi, two mississippi...") you get between wave crests.  If there are no waves at all, you can just tell everyone to partly inflate their vest, herd them into waist/chest-high water, and get them to casually don their fins and masks. 

Let's assume, though, that this is a wavy day so we can talk about Electric Beach's special wave-entry technique.  It works like this.
how to do a surf entry at electric beach
Everyone should fully inflate their vests, so that if they fall down they won't be hitting bottom.  Aside from hitting your head, the bottom's no fun because you can eeeeeasily get disoriented by the poor visibility and oddball wave-driven currents in this channel.  Likewise, they should clear and don their masks early...while on the beach, if possible.

People should line up in buddy teams, with the weaker members inshore, and their shoulders lined up.  The outer man should hold the inner man's shoulder-strap, and vice versa.  That, or you can face your buddy and use two hands on his shoulderstraps, but that second method gives the waves twice as much surface area to push you around.

Now here's the real key.  It seems to work for beach entries for any wave that's not taller than you as you stand in the surf.  (On this beach, anyway.)  Just as a wave crest reaches you, bounce up OFF your toes, so you're momentarily aloft.  Strangely, your head will ride over the wave, and you'll stay perfectly vertical and ride in toward shore no more than half a step. 

The alternative's not much fun:  fighting to stand still.  That means having an outgoing undercurrent tear at your feet while the bottom tries to hold you in place and the surface-wave tries to push your top inshore.  That sucks-- it's like being the bowling pin when the big ball comes for you.  The chances are good that you'll lose your footing and feel out of control.

In mid-chest-high water, take turns putting on your fins.  Take them off your chest-strap one by one, putting on the fin closest to your buddy while you hold one-another's shoulders.  Or let your buddy hold the fin you're not putting on yet.  Your buddy is also responsible for watching the incoming wave pattern, and lettign you know precisely when to bounce up off your feet.  I find a nice countdown between waves keeps everyone informed and prepared.

After donning your fins, the PADI open water manual suggests that you face down with regulator or snorkel in mouth, and swim out to sea.  These instructions seem designed for a very different beach.  Instead, at Electric Beach I recommend that you fall onto your back, with face skyward and head aimed out to sea.  Swim on your back out to sea.  Don't bother with your snorkel, because the channel's water is too murky to see anything and if you're face-down you can neither see nor hear your buddies.  Keep your regulator close by, ready in one hand.   As waves crash over you, put a hand over your mask to keep it in place.  Let the most experienced diver get a bit ahead of the others, so he can call out directions to the stragglers:  "  Swim a bit left... a bit rightward... you're going in toward the concrete wall, so move a bit further right."
9)
Once you're outside the walls, continue swimming out 10~20 feet / 3~7 meters further to get outside the wave-formation zone.  At this point, you're in about 25'/8m of clear water, with large sandy patches and small coral heads directly below you, straight out from you, and to the East.   At the beginning of your dive, it's not a bad place to pop in your regulators and hit the bottom.  You can tie off a buoy here (though there are better places a little further West, along the pipe) and do controlled rope descents, or simply practice free descents in buddy-pairs.  Anywhere between here and the pipes to the north-west are ideal spots for most open water training classes.  Enjoy!

This is also a very nice spot to re-assemble your team for an "exit OK ?" pow-wow at the end of the dive.  It's a good idea to have a quick "exit technique" chat at the surface before attempting to reclaim the beach.

10)
Let's assume you've dropped down to the bottom, and started swimming north-est.  You'll shortly encounter a low wall of coral-covered stones, and a curious pair of pipe service hatches that look a bit like a pair of chair-sized oil drums stuck in the sand.  The coral-covered stones will extend Southward, out to sea, and gradually become a tall (and shallow) truck-width wall sided in steel I-beams and topped with coral-encrusted stone.  You can have a real blast exploring all over this wall (except its southern terminus, where the pipes let out their continuous blast of warm water).  You'll find frequent pincushion starfish and small (yard-wide) turtles on the wall, goatfish and ribbons of schooling yellow striped snapper near the wall, and spotted eagle rays pushing their boat-like noses into the sand in search of crabs.
11)
Let's say you've explored this wall.  You've swum southward along its full extent, and now you're near the end of the pipe.You can get fairly close to the end of the pipe without being caught in its massive current.  If you're off the bottom, it'd be a good idea to keep one hand (maybe both) securely fixed to a nonliving bit of the wall, so you don't fly off.  Better still, get low and flat on the sand, and work your way around to the front of the rock garden in front of the pair of massive pipes.  From this very low vantage point, you can duck unde the current while looking into the mouths of the two 3-yard-wide pipes.  You'll notice that the rock garden in front of  the pipes has at least a handful of fist-sized broken humpback cowry shells.  These animals grow abundantly in the pipes, and occasionally come rocketing out.  Once they get outside, octopi grab them and crunch them into bits leaving fragments of their beauty for us to get weak-kneed over.

Don't try to work closer to the pipes, for 2 very good reasons: 

a) the current will catch you and send you flying past your buddies, out to sea and up to the surface like a monkey being shot into space.  You are not a cosmonaut. 

b) At least 2 big green moray eels call this rock garden 'home'.  They don't appreciate your dragging your body low over their rocks.   I had one chomp my spare second stage's mouthpiece completely off, before I'd realized a moray was there !  It could have been worse...soooo much worse.. if the moray had aimed a little lower and toward the center of my suit.  *ahem*. You see my point.  Don't.  Go.  There.  There are less painful ways to launch a singing career.
12)
On the other hand, maybe your whole team is a bunch of thrill-riders with skills and no problems equalizing.  If you're in a pack of neoprene-clad adrenalin Smurfs (tm),  then sure, go ahead and break every rule of ascent rates.  Drop into the pipe current (in pairs-- stay together) from the top of the pipes or pop up with a good push-off from below.  Once you're in the current, keep an eye on your buddy and don't hold your breath for the even for the barest moment.  You can do headspins, somersaults, and backflips while the current rollercoasters you a hundred or so feet out to sea.  Try to consciously avoid gaining too much altitude, since it's those depth changes that make doctors shake their fingers at your widow.

Once your ride is over, you'll notice that you can't see any landmarks.  You can't see your other buddies.  You're... lost in the desert, man.  Ideally, you'll notice the sand ripples.  These run perpendicular to the current.  So, unless you're at a loss about which way is roughly north/south, you should be OK to just head back north, keeping the sand ripples perpendicular to your line of travel.  If you're uncertain which way to go, send one team member briefly to the surface for a quick look-around.  In general, though, realize that the powerful current you just rode is hogging that space in mid- and shallow-water, so you should stay low as you work your way back to the pipes. 

The trip back is... boring.  Sandy empty bottom the whole way.
13)
On the west side of the pipes, within easy view of the pipes' mouths, is a collapsed tower built from a single vertical pipe.  On night dives, this is a good spot to find sleeping parrot fish and outsized unicorn fish.
14)
Somewhere far west and a little bit south of the pipes' mouths is an underwater cave.  I've heard about it, but never had a guide show me how to find the cave.  I've searched for it myself, with no success.  Instead, all I found was really boring sandy fields and rocks.  So, I can't really recommend you waste any time looking for the cave.  By contrast, the main area where you start is a fine, photogenic, and fun place to spend your whole tank.  So, if you're like me, you'll just give up on trying to find the cave.
15)
When you've reached about 1200 lbs of pressure in a 3000 lb tank (roughly 1/3 of your air), it's probably time to head back to the exit cove.to Between the pipe mouths and the exit cove you're in utterly no danger from currents or waves, so in a pinch you can just go to the surface and snorkel or swim on your back toward the exit cove, but you'll bore yourself and tire your legs en route.  Ideally, you'll go there underwater, and surface as a team roughly 20' south outside the exit cove, nicely outside the surf zone.

It's here, at the surface with BCDs inflated, facing shore, that you should discuss the best strategy for your exit.
16)
Exiting's pretty easy, though a little messy.  On a flat, calm day you can snorkel in; backfloat in; hell, you can unicycle in toward the beach.  It's a piece of cake on a flat day.  On a wavy day, though, it takes a little more thought. Remember to shoot for a straight line to the beach, slightly west of the channel's midline.  Avoid either wall, because there're unseen head-bonker rocks there.  Forget about face-down snorkeling toward shore, since visibility is near zero.  I've found it's best to grab a buddy's shoulder while he grabs yours, and use one another to keep a steady line as you kick backward on the surface, BCD inflated, one hand on mask, regulator in place if possible.  (If not, hold your breath and use a hand to keep your mask from slipping as waves pass over you.)  Take an occasional glance over your shoulder, if possible.   As you get shallower, use more and more caution so you don't bonk your head, and stand up and take off your fins while you're in CHEST HIGH water.  Don't wait to flounder in the ankle-high water-- no, let the chest-high stuff keep you near upright while you remove fins and put them in the upper of your two BCD chest clips.  Leave your mask, regulator, and weight belt in place until you're well up onto the beach.
17)
All your stuff is gonna get covered in sand if you dally on the beach, so head straight up to the showers or the benches to rinse your gear.  Don't set your stuff down in the sand if you can possibly avoid it.

18) 
Pack up, head home, or lounge around the car and make a second and third dive later.  That's it... easy spot, clean and fun. 

Great place for a picnic, if you watch the car closely and the locals are feeling friendly.
GENERAL NOTES ABOUT THE SOUTH-WEST SIDE OF O'AHU:

This side of the island is picturesque in a desert-like way.  Not much in the way of shopping, restaurants, or convenience stores nearby, and please remember that the area's hostile to tourists.  On the other hand, you ARE near Makaha, which was the 1950s mecca for big wave surfing before this island's North Shore took that title.  A bit further north-west along the coast from this divespot is a boat harbor from which you can make boat trips to the wreck of the Mahi and Makaha Caverns, both very satisfying dives.  (The Mahi is an intentionally sunk "artificial reef / shipwreck" in about 100'/33m of water.  Makaha Caverns is a 30~45'/15m dive with lots of turtles and a fairly decent array of corals.)
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All dive maps, art, and text in this website are copyright 2004/2005 by Seth A. Bareiss.
Reproduction, in part or in full, is by written permission of the author/artist only.

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These divesite descriptions are not intended to be a complete substitute for local diveguides, local orientation by experienced professionals, or your own good sense & caution.   Please remember that dive sites do change over time, & daily variations in weather can cause extreme changes in currents, waves, and surf.  Whenever possible, consult with divers who are exiting a site as you enter, and seriously consider the value of consulting with local professionals whenever using a divesite for the first time.  Please use these divesite descriptions merely to help plan your dive trips, help decide which sites would be the most suitable for you, and to enhance your enjoyment of the dives.  Yours is the ultimate responsibility for choosing to dive a particular site on a given day.
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This page last updated 2005.3.23