try lowering exposure with exposure comp to expose for the highlights correctly and then recovering the info in a post proc program for the areas rendered too dark 

Digital sensors are simply not good at this sort of dynamic range, black and white negative film or colour negative film (C41) is far better at it. Slide film (E6) is notoriously hard to expose for, and in this respect it resembles the sort of difficulty that digital sensors present.

People who shoot slide film make metering decisions regarding which part of the curve they want to prioritise, as you can’t have it all. Grads are a very useful tool in such a situation. This particular scene fits perfectly, as you can effectively divide the picture in half vertically — it has a top half which suits a certain tonal range, and a bottom half which suits a completely different tonal range. In real life, your eye is darting around and accustomising itself to the highly local areas of a scene, making it seem like your eye can see the whole tonal range at once, and it can’t, but we patch it all together as if we can. The camera, of course, has to see the whole tonal range at once, and it can’t.

On my D50, which I shoot in raw, I use the grad filter tool in Lightroom a lot, as the raw image does have a touch bit more latitude than slide film has, but even so it’s pretty easy to see the limitation of a digital sensor under such circumstances.

This, incidentally, is precisely why misguided photographers go down the HDR route. Don’t be tempted. Your pictures will end up rubbish. HDR is a mistake. Selective metering and grad filters are a better direction. By all means take more than one shot of a scene — exposed for the sky half and exposed for the foreground half, and layer them together as if you were using a grad filter, but there’s no need to get so precise at this that you compensate for every little area in both dimensions around every tiny detail and every tonal field. You end up with the laughable HDR mistake of processing the high frequencies out of the shot, and the result looks like it’s been processed with a visual low-pass filter. Or in other words, it looks like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of…

where the trees stop the ocean begins and there is a dock with a few cruise ships there that are seen with the naked eye no problem.  [

I have real difficulty fitting the ocean and cruise liners into this perspective - particularly with the mountain range closing the horizon immediately after the tree belt.

Can you post another shot exposed for the sky?

peter's 3 suggestions are exactly the options I would have considered 

for me:

1.  GND for the hardware fix
2.  Exposure #1 for sky and Exposure #2 for the darker section and blend exposures via layers for the software fix

I have to say that based on the pic that's posted I don't see the need for complicated fixes just yet.

The image above has been exposed for the foreground - which is very clearly in shadow (probably cloud). The sunlit middle distance, horizon and sky are overexposed because of this. I would certainly wait for a moment when the land is equally lit before deciding what corrective filters or layered exposures might be needed. You might also want to check what the meter setting is on the camera that's causing it to expose for the darkest area of the subject

so noob question.

when you experts says bracket, i supposed it means 3 shots, -0.3 0.0 and +0.3.
and would this mean i need a trippod for these three shots?

Normally you would bracket at-1, 0 and +1.  One-third a stop either way won't do any good. Depending on the scene, you may need more shots, adding 1-stop more on either side. A tripod is essential.

it looks like theres a HUGE mountain behind us or the whole  village could be stepped on by a giant foot!