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1) The maximum aperture of the lens is not an issue. You will be stopping way down from the maximum aperture, so even your f/1.4 lens is fine for these purposes.
2) All your lenses will stop down to the point of diffraction loss of sharpness with your 6D -- probably f/16 is where it will show up, but it will be rather insignificant there such that you probably shouldn't worry about it even if you print 16 x 24.
2b) Only you can do the tests to find out your camera's performance and how that accords with your taste.
3) Shoot late, near sunset / dusk, on into the twilight. Alternatively get on site an hour before dawn and start shooting. Lower light levels make the long exposures easier.
4) Your camera shake issues will be much more from wind than from mirror slap / shutter opening. Use your best tripod, fewest number of leg sections, roll the center column down or take it out, and weigh the tripod down with weights, rocks, or camera bags. Stand where you shield the camera from the wind. Have your assistant (if you have a friend with you) stand with you. Time your shots between gusts if you can. Bite the leg tips firmly into the soil.
4b) Camera shake from mirror slap / shutter opening is mostly an issue in the range of 1/100 to one second, depending on focal length and quality of ballhead and tripod. Self timer is plenty good enough. Two second self-timer is probably good enough because resonance on a good tripod is only about one second, longer on not-so-good ones. For long shots that are over a second in length, the amount of shake due to the shutter opening is swamped by the longer stable time during the exposure.
5) On other cameras, not sure about 6D, you can put the camera in to a Low ISO mode which is one stop below the native ISO, usually 50 ISO one below native 100 ISO. This will actually cause you to lose one stop of dynamic range, which may not be an issue depending on time of day (dusk is low contrast often) or weather conditions (storm clouds may block the sun for low contrast or make very bright whites or rays or highlights for high contrast).
6) You can combine ND filters but each filter cuts a slight bit of image quality, less than the diffraction effect, and mostly in lowered contrast and microcontrast.
6b) Make sure your filters and lenses are very clean and monitor them for moisture deposition / salt spray deposition at the coast.
7) You can try combining multiple sequential shots, like say ten shots at two seconds each, if two seconds is the longest you can get in one shot. Combine them as layers in Photoshop. You will have to research the layer mode to make it additive. I found links for the technique (somewhere) and I tried it as a test for a noise reduction technique and figured that it was doable but takes impeccable tripod technique and practice. I intend to revisit it sometime. This is an astrophotography technique called "stacking". You might as well try it and see what happens.
8) Compose your picture with blurred water in mind. It is not an automatic plus for composition and can detract from pictures.
9) Get closer to the water and then larger movement will make more blur. Bear in mind the composition of course.
10) Look at examples to guesstimate exposure length (some may even say) in relation to light levels. You will find that many are shot in twilight. Study them for composition too.
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