Ships at night - how to?

Mods feel free to move this to an appropriate forum.

Not normally being a "night owl" with the camera as such, but last night saw the Queen Elizabeth 2 depart the UK forever & wanted (like so many others here) to see her off.

Now, this grand lady sailed past our area about 915(ish) so it was very dark.
She was about 3 miles out to sea & not exactly lit up like a xmas tree(even though it was a farewell cruise).

Bear in mind she was travelling probably 11 knots minimum, and although I could get all of her in the viewfinder using 500mm on tripod & ISO cranked up as far as it would go, I tried all manner of exposure / aperture combinations to try get a decent pic of her but due to the ship moving it was inevitable to get light trails & blurry images.

A proposition then - How would YOU have gone about undertaking the same situation?

Just wondering really as I hadn't thought about it before & therefore wasn't disappointed when I got home to view the images.

Once the obvious is done -- highest ISO and widest aperture -- if the shutter speed is still to slow to freeze a moving object three miles away, then I guess it's just too dark.

You should have been to get something at f/4 if you'd shot RAW?
Why I love RAW - '53 Ford Sunliner

I'm never throwing away a picture again

Let's see what you got?

Luckily I shot in both RAW & JPEG. RAW version below - untouched.
This one was 1/25th sec, F4, ISO 1600.

Well, that is pretty sad, & it looks as if you did everything you could there. Too bad. I expected that it would look much better than that.

shoot them at twilight maybe?? ships + long shutter = never gonna happen! like ADE H said, sometimes its just too dark...

Unfortunately for us, the QE2 wasn't due to leave Southampton until 715 that night, so otherwise it would have been a case of joining the 1000's of others that crammed into Southampton to say farewell.
By the time she'd got past the Isle of Wight it was about 915 - 930 and by that time was very dark indeed - pitch black actually, and had to use a torch to see the dials etc.
I did notice that if I lifted shadows the noise is incredibly bad. (Lexar CF card)

Oh well, it was an experiment & guess I was lucky I even got that one - some of the others make pretty drastic viewing.:o

Thanks all for joining in - think I'll give night stuff a miss.