Jonathon Gubbins must have been on Santa’s ‘Nice’ list.

Northern Peru did its best sand-bottomed impersonation of Restaurants last week, delivering some hollowed-out goodness to our friend Jonathon Gubbins.

Gubbins’ approach to tube riding isn’t the copy/paste format we’ve grown so accustomed to watching. While most surfers pop-up and lock their feet into an unbreakable stance, Joni prefers to tango across his shortboard. His back foot creeps in front of the tail pad, gifting him a forward-driven drop-knee stance. This leaves the front foot slithering towards the nose, submerging more of the rail-line up front.

Buyer beware: this technique delivers a great amount of speed that doesn’t want to be tamed. Notice how Joni’s hands rarely leave the face of the wave? If he lets go he’ll end up on the shoulder, and eventually cruise onto Barrel Dodgers Anonymous. His stance has allowed him to harness all the power that this left has on tap, and his good ol’ fashioned hand brake makes sure to keep him deep in the pit.

While this technique provides greater speed control and a more aesthetically pleasing barrel stance, it is quite pressing to execute. Due to the weakened engagement over the fins, forward foot placement places a great emphasis on drawing a proper line from the take off and committing to it.

With such an excess of carbon-copy tube riders floating across the interwebs, we are fortunate that guys like Joni aren’t afraid to boogie under the lip.