IT STARTED—AS many great adventures now do—with a flyover on Google Earth. As an avid surfer, Kamil Bialous might have been doing reconnaissance on a new surf break. But this time, his interest wasn’t in the water. He and his partner, Urszula Lipsztajn, had long been scouting for a plot on which to build a pied-à-terre (a pied-à-mer, really) near one of Canada’s premier surf destinations, Tofino, B.C. Something he hadn’t noticed before had caught his eye, and he’d peered closer at his screen. “What are these forested lots here?” Over their six years of looking, their search had spread out to Ucluelet. Tofino and Ucluelet sit at opposite ends of about 40 prime kilometres of Vancouver Island’s west coast, each town at the tips of a section shaped roughly like a deck cleat on a boat.
Instead of the open ocean side, this plot was tucked into a bay at the base of the southerly isthmus on which Ucluelet perches. To ground-truth his findings, Kamil and Urszula traveled from their home in Squamish, more than 200 km away by a straight line on Google Earth—but six hours of travel, including a ferry ride, in the real world. Also not as straightforward as it appeared virtually: the lot. Their realtor had instructed them to show up at low tide and wear their gum boots.
Sloshing in along the coastline, they found a gap in the biomass that grew right to the high-tide line. They waded in through thick brush, scrabbled over stumps and fallen timber, crawled under deadfall. “Probably why no one touched it,” says Kamil now. “It was so gnar.” But his gut reaction was immediate: “This is so
