I wasn't terribly happy with the ship mat at first either. I found it didn't sit flat and the cards and tokens moved around to much. My solution to this was mounting the ship mat on a piece of foam core board. I made the piece of foam core board 10 5/8" by 8 5/8". This left lots of room for the cards on the bottom. Here is a picture and a link to the YouTube video I did.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoSTzBjOQMQ
Attachment 8909
They make foam core board in different colors. I am going to mount some on Blue for English and some on Red for French :)