In this paper, we propose a dominant Doppler compensation technique for single carrier single input multiple output (SIMO) underwater acoustic communication. An initial pre-processing of the dominant Doppler is used to speed up the convergence rate of the adaptive receiver at the beginning of the transmission. Then, a tracking scheme is proposed to compensate for the residual dominant Doppler. The receiver scheme is tested in an experimental context. Successful communication is demonstrated at up to 4.926 kSymb/s with a transmitting platform moving up to 1.8 m/s. The system exhibits enhanced robustness for continuous-time communication with large Doppler shifts values and time-varying multipath channels.