What would be the best method

The patch tool works..I just edited it and it looked fine.

Unfortunately my CS4 is crashing lately for some reason, so I lost it..But i quickly recreated it..

But anyway, I used the patch tool to draw around the floats and then dragged to the snow and ice on the side. Photoshop then blends the area you dragged to with the area you drew the patch onto. If you do this a few times you will have the basic effect.

After that you need to do some minor touch up with the paint brush to make the edges match.

The biggest task, and its not so big if you know photoshop, is the sun reflection.

I used the eye dropper and selected the brightest color in the fore ground reflection, chose a large sized airbrush and took flow to 35% and opacity to about 50%, then painted over the patched areas recreating the suns reflection.

Now I use a WACOM so this is easy, I would say you could do it with the mouse but you would need to take more care.

After the sun reflection was in place I eye droppered (is that a word?) the ice lying next to it, its a bluish grey, and again used the same brush settings to kind of fog in the edges.

Zoomed back out to 100% using the photo up there, it looked spot on.

If you want you can send me the raw and I will do it for you and then upload the PSD so you can see my work.

PM me if you want.