While I don't normally post stuff promoting helicopter fishing, you need to check out this amazing promotional video for Nimmo Bay Helicopter Fishing & Wilderness Adventures.

While you are watching the video of the helicopter flying over the mountain peaks and running along the river valleys, click and drag your mouse over the video to pan the camera around. Again, awesome.

It's clear that there are huge costs to developing a video like this but at $124,110 for exclusive use of the resort for you and 17 other friends, it's still within their advertising budget...

PS - Sorry in advance for the bad cover version of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. It's the Canadian Tenors.

The video is below:

This is one amazing piece of surfing footage.

From the official press release: This morning at 2:00am local Hawaii time, professional big wave surfer Mark Visser made history by achieving a night ride on waves measuring 30-40 foot faces off the shores of Maui with specially engineered LED lights built into a buoyancy vest and modified into the surfboard.

Nick Castro from Active Sea Kayaking has posted another interesting video that we can learn from. This time he puts the deck camera on Michael Pardy, owner of SKILS and the two decided to mix it up in the rocks which is a nice break from the big water surfing that I have been watching and posting over the past couple of weeks.

Playing in and around rocks is a great skill to work on. It's a quick way to develop excellent boat control and gets you thinking about boat handling not from just a going forward perspective but also going backwards. You learn quick how to control both ends of the boat. It's also quite a challenge to get around a rock and not get pushed into it by the wave swells so you learn about timing and hull acceleration.

If getting involved in rockhopping is of interest to you, it's easy to get started. On a calm day find some rocks and get as close as you can without touching them. Once you get more confident do the same thing with a little bit more waves and swell. Work on going forward then backwards then add some speed to the whole thing. It's sometimes a nice change from just going out paddling and putting some miles under your hull. Go slow and start playing.

Finally, once you get more confident and start to look for rocks and medium swell, do yourself a favour and put on a helmet. Waves, rocks and that big melon on your shoulders often don't mix well.

Lions Bay has got to be one of the weirder whitewater kayaking films I have seen in a very long time. In a weird way it reminds me of one of those European advertisements that Homer got made when he was running his Mr. Plow business.

Watch for the cool whitewater sliding action in the last 2 min. It's worth the wait purely with the suspense of thinking he is going to wipe out and mangle up his face. See for yourself below.

If you are looking out your window to a frozen wasteland of car slush I have got a real treat to keep the dreams of summer canoe or kayak trips going a bit longer.

Alex Horner recently released this two part short film highlighting the magic and beauty of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, located in Minnesota.

Shot over a weekend canoe trip back on the 24th of September, 2010 it has everything I would expect from a canoe trip. Good scenery, cracking fire and misty mornings.

I'm ready to shut down everything right now and head-out except for the fact that up north everything is covered with snow and ice.

Until then keep pressing play below.

Ken Whiting makes hand rolling a sea kayak look way too easy.

Jeff Allen is an aspiring BCU 5* coach and works for Sea Kayaking Cornwall. Over the past several years he has been designing and perfecting and new design for a rescue system particularly for sea kayaks.

It looks part tow line and part whitewater throw bag. It can be worn as a belt and it does triple duty as a tow system, a throw/rescue bag and a sea anchor.

Over the years I have seen many different homemade designs and I have got to say that this looks to be one of the best thought out systems I have seen in a long time. I agree with Dunks from Solent Sea Kayaking who wrote about it first. It isn’t pretty but it sure looks like it would function really well.

The video below can explain it much better than I can so I will let it do the talking.

Keeping in line with the recent surfing theme, I found this film trailer below. I’m fascinated with surfing but even more then that I’m fascinated with surf films. To me, they seem to be so ahead of kayaking or canoeing films in that the angles are better and they make better use of techniques like slow motion to create those big beautiful sweeps as the surfer goes from left to right across the TV. That’s not to say that there are lots of good sea kayak pieces out there but I will die a happy man if I never see another camera-stuck-to-the-front-deck-facing-backwards kayak surfing film.

Here is the description on the new Fiberglass and Megapixels film that won several cinematography and documentary awards on the film festival circuit.

Fiberglass and Megapixels sheds light on Hawaii's North Shore winter surfing scene and finds the true beauty within the overcrowded image gathering free for all.

The surfing industry relies on these inspiring pictures from Hawaii to sell the surfing lifestyle to the masses. It’s all about the surfing image, and these surfing images must first get in the camera. Fiberglass and Megapixels goes deep as professional surfers, photographers and cinematographers share their perspective on what it takes and what it means to get the shot and be able to live a life completely based around surfing.

If you have ever wanted to see what it's like inside a kayak manufacturer plant then be prepared to have all your dreams fulfilled.

Palm Equipment is a manufacturer out of the United Kingdom that sells paddling clothing, PFD’s, spray decks, as well as manufacturer Dagger kayaks for the European market.

The video is below.

This is easily one of the best looking short films I have seen in a long, long time. Put together by renowned photographer and body boarder Mickey Smith, Dark Side of the Lens is a poem set to images and music dealing with his motivations behind surfing and surf photography.

"Originally I planned for the film to be more anonymous, rather than biographical, an all encompassing piece, to represent the photographers keeping the surfing machine afloat", explains Smith.  “Something that offers insight into what it takes to grind out a living as a water-based photographer in the surfing industry: a short experimental glimpse at a life lived in the shadow of obsessive photographic pursuits."

Listen for the best quote in the film: "If I only scrape a living, at least it’s a living worth scraping."