Trying my hand at a sunset on a windy day

[jdsfighter]

So I haven't really done a lot of sunsets, and I absolutely love the look that some photographers get using a neutral density filter shooting a sunset around water. Unfortunately, I don't have a ND filter, so I attempted to take a bracketed HDR photograph to help smooth the water a bit. The outcome of the HDR wasn't great, so I used one of the stills, and used lightroom to make a pseudo ND grad. What are your thoughts? What could I do to improve next time?