Another thing I wish I would have known about six years ago

NOAA Coastline Extractor

This is a page that will generate a line drawing of a section of coast that you're interested in. Very handy for making maps and figures. You just specify the lat-lon area you're interested in, and it will return a data file for use in Matlab or ArcGIS etc, and a line drawing that you can save and use.

I found this through a page at Wood's Hole/USGS with a number of handy scripts for Matlab
Main page
including
the air-sea toolbox in particular.

An alternative option is this whole package:
M_map by Rich Pawlowicz