Congratulations, I won (auction) a Deep Blue trip last year. Through SRI. (Shark Research Institute)
It's a great place to get in some good diving and relax. Steve Fox (owner) is really into Whale Shark research so has some good information to share. He's [user]DeepBlueDivers[/user] here. Very personable individual.
Matt runs their dive operation and is one of the most accommodating people I've ever met. And Capt. Swin did a great job of putting us on 6 whale sharks last spring. (2009) We were there during a research week so there were presentations most every night and we participated in a tagging attempt. My buddy shot a picture of one and submitted it to the Ecocean database, now when it's spotted he gets updated.
I've read they've seen sharks every month for the past 20 months so you might have a good chance also - it's snorkel only. We'd go look for them after our morning dives, they're out in deeper water. You look for boils - disturbed water - with fish jumping in it. Often there was a shark nearby when we saw that. If it's a little rough, in our experience, it was better, the days it was flat calm we saw none.
The rooms are clean, large and a step or two above basic, the A/C worked really well in ours. All have decks that face out onto the ocean about 50' away. They provide bottled water in the room and there's a mini-frig - don't drink the tap water. There's sodas, juices and beers available in the cooler in the lounge. And a very complete pay bar. All on the honor system.
It's a really quiet area at night. And seemed safe as you'd need a boat to get there. We left the door key outside unconcealed all week (key holder was too big to carry) and nothing was ever touched. Except the ladies straightened my mess daily.
Food was very good with several menu choices. Most non-dive activities take place in the dining room/bar/lounge, there's couches, the bar, a pool table, a couple of Internet connected PC's and WiFi. No network TV but there is a TV/DVD player.
If your room is near the lounge, the WiFi will work on your deck outside. It's pretty slow though, you sort of get used to it.
Steve's mom Shirley will meet you at the Princess dock and bring you to their boat for the 5 min. ride to Deep Blue. They're on the opposite side of a lagoon channel mid-island so there's no town access except via boat. But they're often doing errands, picking up staff etc. so I don't there'd be a problem getting to town. I did see something about a scheduled evening in town but there were just a few of us that week so it never happened. Utila is pretty small so you could easily see all of town in one afternoon. The days there's a night dive, there's no afternoon dive so my buddy used the time to go into town.
The resort is on the beach with the dive dock/storage area on the lagoon about 100 yds. to the back. Since the back side fronts onto a Mangrove lagoon, there's a lot of bugs, especially late afternoon. The sand flies will tear you up unless you have protection. Especially just before the night dives until you get out through the channel to open water.
I used Deep Woods Off, it worked well. After a week of diving - and forgetting a couple times, my legs looked like I had chickenpox. One of the other divers had it worse, she was our research professional and decided to go birdwatching one day along the lagoon. We kidded her that they wouldn't let her back into the U.S., she was covered in bites from head to toe.
One other stupid thing I did is walk on the beach unprotected and then put my boots on trapping the sand inside. There was definitely something (sand fleas?) in the sand as I had a couple dozen really itchy small bites on my shins that night. Although they vanished within a day or two.
Oh and don't leave the screen open during the day, we had to "fog" the room one night to sleep.
There is a shore dive off Deep Blue, it's a slightly difficult entry though. One of the dive staff will show you the entry. We were told the best way to go out is bundle everything in your BC and float it out to deeper water. There's a really nice reef just off Deep Blue - the Pretty Bush dive site and another called Labyrinth just next to it. From Deep Blue you have to find an opening in the reef and return to it back to shore. It's a little past the resort to the west.
We dove Labyrinth as our night dive, it's a good dive, lots of channels and swimthroughs. Other must dives are Pinnacles, Duppy Waters and Blackish Point on the north side of Utila. Duppy Waters isn't on every dive site map but Matt will take you there. Pinnacles is also good, it's a swimthrough that lets you out deep on the wall.
IMO the best dive I did all week was Black Hills though. It's a seamount sort of SE of Utila. It comes up to about 40-50' from the surface. First dive, nothing special - we swam around the top and then went down one side. It's very vertical.
Second dive, we saw about 100 schooling barracuda, 6-8 of those huge Oceanic Triggers, and at least a 1/2 dozen grouper - most in the 4-5 range. I was literally able to film within 5' of them before they slowly moved off - not bothered by my presence at all. And countless other schools of fish - hundreds of yellow snappers. And when I surfaced, Swin was eating sugar cane, as he dropped the remains in the water, Black Durgon by the hundreds were schooling under the boat. I swam thru them filming as they slowly parted.
There was also another dive we did between Deep Blue and town - just on the other side of the lagoon channel - don't know the name. It started out really boring, poor vis and a steep sandy drop but once we hit about 70' it got interesting fast. In many of the small clumps of sea grass there were seahorses, a moray in a little outcropping, and one of those red-lipped batfish. Later in the dive my buddies saw an Electric Ray and something else they'd never seen before. So it turned out to be a good dive.
Deep Blue has a fast boat (engine is a lot newer than the boat...lol) so we dove all the way around the island on multiple days.
We took the Princess, it's an easy ride over. They leave right on time. One of the DB staff will take you over on Saturday morning for the 6:20 ferry back.
There's a singledivers.com trip report - maybe by WreckWrench here somewhere - or Google Deep Blue Utila. She links to lots of surface pictures of the resort. We don't really have any, all our stuff is u/w.
I think the best recommendation is that I would go there again.
