Scavenging

Call it what you will.  Call it scavenging which has a negative connotation and calls up visions of vultures, or call it re-use or re-cycling or re-purposing, all of which are more fashionable terms for the same thing.  Regardless, of what you call it, once upon a time, it was the one and only way to get materials to build a boat, especially in the arctic where boat materials did not grow and had to be scavenged on the beach.
You can view scavenging as an act of desperation or opportunism or some other unsavory name, but whatever you want to think of it, it is still going on as illustrated in the following photos.

Fellow kayaker, Tony who launches his kayaks at the Encinal boat ramp told me that he met the guy who has been removing steel fence posts from the rock wall next to the boat ramp.  Supposedly he got a few hundred bucks for them.  First he strips off the fencing.

Then he uses a pipe cutter to cut the poles.  Then he hauls them off to a scrap metal dealer.

 

And when he's all done, more of the fence is gone.  I must admit the rock wall looks better without the fence.

Meanwhile, just on the other side of the wall is what is left of the sunken boat.  Someone has been sawing sections of it off.  I'm sure it's not the plastic hull they're after.  I imagine it's the stuff that's bolted to the plastic that they want like jam cleats and winches and whatnot.  Easier to disassemble back at the garage.
Just recently, I read somewhere of a theory that says essentialy that nature favors processes that speed up the work or entropy.  Left to the strictly physical processes like oxidation and abrasion, the fence and the sunken boat would probably have been sitting as is for another few decades. But with the aid of scavengers, the job of entropy has been favorably accelerated.