Pearl & Hermes
cwilcox | August 4, 2010For the past five days, I have been snorkeling and diving at Pearl & Hermes Atoll. P & H is one of the prettiest places I have ever been - stunning, vibrant reefs, calm, blue waters - the works. It's stupid pretty. The atoll has the highest standing stock of fish and the highest number of fish species in the entire Northwest Hawaiian Islands - and you can tell the minute you're in the water.
It's an atoll in the truest sense, in that most of it is underwater, with only a handful of small, sandy islands fringing its edges. While the reef covers over 194,000 acres, only 80 of that is…