Ship detection plays a significant role in military and civil fields. Although some state-of-the-art detection methods, based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) have certain advantages, they still cannot solve the challenge well, including the large size of images, complex scene structure, a large amount of false alarm interference, and inshore ships. This paper proposes a ship detection method from optical remote sensing images, based on visual attention enhanced network. To effectively reduce false alarm in non-ship area and improve the detection efficiency from remote sensing images, we developed a light-weight local candidate scene network( ${\mathrm{L}}^2$ CSN) to extract the local candidate scenes with ships. Then, for the selected local candidate scenes, we propose a ship detection method, based on the visual attention DSOD(VA-DSOD). Here, to enhance the detection performance and positioning accuracy of inshore ships, we both extract semantic features, based on DSOD and embed a visual attention enhanced network in DSOD to extract the visual features. We test the detection method on a large number of typical remote sensing datasets, which consist of Google Earth images and GaoFen-2 images. We regard the state-of-the-art method [sliding window DSOD (SW+DSOD)] as a baseline, which achieves the average precision (AP) of 82.33%. The AP of the proposed method increases by 7.53%. The detection and location performance of our proposed method outperforms the baseline in complex remote sensing scenes.