I realized that part of my problem was the scale of things.  Bagginsbill was working with thing's scaled around 1-10K, while I'm between 100K-1M, so the nodes' effect were being stretched too thin.  I tweaked the scale factors, which fixed the clouds, and improved the water some, but it's proximity to the sand underneath is still causing problems (bagginsbill - works on this as we speak ;-)

Another thing I'm runing into it the "corn row" effect of stretching the X-scale so much.  I had adjusted the cellular node's x-factor to account, but as you can see, it's not quite right.... Ideas?