I don't know how you are doing with your tests, but based on your last image (a huge improvement over your first!) I would suggest:-

a) give your water something more to refract. Perhaps by tiling or otherwise texturing the floor/ground under the water (depending on what sort of surface it is supposed to be).

b) give your water something more to reflect. A simple specular light up behind the figure would highlight the ripples better. It looks like you may have a faint bluish specular light there already, but it is hardly noticeable and does not have much spread.

Or you could set up a self-lit image backdrop for the water to reflect, or use bagginsbill's free EnvSphere dome.

By the way, your last test image is over-lit from the front. The specular highlights on her clothing are going much "brighter than white" and so you are losing a lot of detail. If you increased the light intensity in order to lighten the dark shadows, they are not there because there is too little light in your scene, they are there because you are not gamma-correcting your image. There is another thread about that, by bagginsbill.... for another time perhaps!

"If I were a shadow, I know I wouldn't like to be half of what I should be."
Mr Otsuka, the old black tomcat in Kafka on the Shore (Haruki Murakami)