Efficient mobile detection equipment plays a vital role in ensuring maritime safety, and accurate ship identification is crucial for maritime traffic. Recently, advanced learning-based methods boost the accuracy of ship detection, but face challenges on mobile devices due to size and computation. Thus, we propose a lightweight ship detection network based on feature fusion, called AFF-LightNet. We introduce iterative attentional feature fusion (IAFF) into the proposed neck network, improving the efficiency of feature fusion by introducing a multi-scale channel attention module. Also, Conv is replaced by DCNv2 in the backbone network to further improve the detection accuracy of the proposed network. DCNv2 enhances the spatial sampling position in convolution and Rol pooling by introducing offsets. Moreover, a lightweight convolution GhostConv was introduced into the head network to reduce the number of parameters and computation cost. Last, SIOU was leveraged to improve the convergence speed of the model. We conduct extensive experiments on the publicly available dataset SeaShips and compare it with existing methods. The experimental results show that compared with the standard YOLOv8n, the improved network has an average accuracy of 98.8%, an increase of 0.4%, a reduction of 1.9 G in computational complexity, and a reduction of 0.19 M in parameter count.