As a sailor cruising up and down the coast, it is good to know where to expect services. Unfortunately it is not easy to find things like marinas or services on the charts. Unlike a road trip, planning where to go during the cruising season requires some knowledge of where to go and what might be found when you arrive. That is what interested me to find the data and make a visualization of it.
In the image above is a graphic illustrating the location of Florida Clean Marinas. The colors correspond to the type of marina, and the size of the circle corresponds to the number of wet slips(spots for in water storage). From data such as this, one can see where different boating centers are, for example Tampa Bay Area and Fort Lauderdale-Miami area are both major boating centers as can be seen in the above graphic. The long line of marinas up the East Coast are all on the intracoastal waterway, so if you are planning to take that route, there are plenty of places to stop.
To make this graphic work better, the size of the circles should be on an exponential scale instead of a linear scale. The exponential scale will reveal the largest marinas more easily and help create more difference between large marinas and smaller ones. Making the circles more transparent may also be helpful to reveal smaller marinas hiding in the clusters.
Links:
Data Source: https://geodata.dep.state.fl.us/datasets/clean-marinas/data