Yes, but volume emission can do pretty godrays.
a little bit of confusion here?
@bckpkol
Just in case you are not trolling: The volume-shader is (only) on the water object. I just used emission on the objects (sphere/plane) in order to show the effect of the volume (absorption based on distance between water surface and objects). But this is not necessary and works just as well with a simple diffuse shader:
hey dude how do you make the water blue? the shader has no blue. is it the background or the light or something different?
Background usually makes a lot of the ocean color
i was thinking that. still wasn’t worknig though. so i used an earlier shader where the diffuse is mixed with blue and white, not black and white. probably because the bg image was covered in clouds. @sono2000, and help?
watch farther up the thread. he put a volume absorption node into the outputs volume…
I cannot remember the name of it but for water there’s also this effect that when you look at water from a high angle you see the reflections from environment and when you look at it from an angle close to 90° you see through the water… what was that again? thaat’s missing here as well 
is fresnel the solution here? not rly or?
The effect is called Snell’s Window:
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