Gerstner all the way 
Yes, I am using gerstner waves from the tessendorf paper. We were lucky enough to have Dr. Tessendorf himself grace us with a lecture at Epic last year and it was an eye opening lecture to be sure. I have recreated most of his paper so far and the possibilties are endless when you consider both the waves and his solved form of the Snell equation in vector form.
The ‘spectrum’ of the waves contains most of the character of the waves. You have to be somewhat careful selecting the frequencies when rendering for realtime. I am using 20 waves at the highest quality setting, and then layering on some texture based normals and bubbles for fine detail. I tried using the existing wave spectrum formulas but found when using only 20 waves that a custom formula is best. Don’t worry, I will share all of my research in due time. Not much of it is ground breaking, but having everything controlled by one formula adds endless possibilities to what you can do.
here is a teaser image:
(please excuse the lack of premultiplied alpha on the fish, I will fix that at some point)
All of the fish and corals in this image were taken from the reef aquarium I had many years ago. I sold it when I moved to a new house but plan to pick up the hobby again once my daughter is old enough to help me out. All corals from local frags of course.