Photoshop :: Stitching Wakeboard/action Photos

I am trying to stitch together a sequence of wake boarding shots and put them into one picture. I have done it semi-successfully only once and would love to learn how to re-create this awesome effect every time. This is the one photo I did get to work... although i cant get any others to work.

I am pretty sure I didn't do this correctly but it was the only way I could figure out how. Here goes... I started by bringing in all the images into separate layers into cs3 I then selected all of them and chose Auto-Align. Once it got all of the frames onto the canvas I arranged them from left to right in to layers palette then chose the top image in to layers palette and chose create mask.

I then used the eraser tool and brought the next image through so that i could see it. Once I could see it I would move onto the second layer in the layer palette and create layer mask and do the same for all the layers.

Once done I would choose Auto-Blend and it usually leaves a few of the frames out of the picture. This is what the unsuccessful ones looked like

I have also tried not doing any of the clipping masks, by just bringing in the pictures and then going straight to AutoBlend after I did AutoAlign this is the result that yielded.