Welcome. For me, PS does a fine job with fonts. I'm not out there doing anything for mass publication so my fonts don't have to look perfect...they just have to legible. Using a vector program for doing fonts at this size is sort of like using a bulldozer to weed my garden. Of course, having said that I'm sure someone will come along and disagree but if you just want to make something pretty decent a vector app would be overkill just for labeling. If you have one then use it by all means, though.

For the oceans try doing up some random clouds then color the parts farthest away from land a darker color or a gradient map. The bad thing about relying on patterns is that they tend to repeat a lot and really irritate the eye.