Hypothetical Life or Death Situation
 

If you're stranded on an island with no help or food coming your way anytime soon and you had only natural gut strings and leather replacement grips in your bag. Would you consider eating them?
If yes, how? This is a very important question.

I am a vegetarian so I'd just die.

If you eat them you'll die of starvation a few days later anyway... if you can digest that stuff anyway. I suppose if you boil the string would make a nice pasta, and the grips could be eaten like bacon

and oh this beats my hypothetical being abducted by aliens question by a light year.

I would use the string as fishing line (or to make snares if there was any game on the island) and bits of leather as bait to catch something better to eat.

Sell the strings and grips online and use money to buy food:)

Oooh now here's a question. Does the same principle apply for a vegetarian/vegan in terms of not using leather grips or gut string in a match?

Dude, he said natural gut. Water is a big no no.

That's why polyester strings are the best. You never know when you might get stranded on a deserted island.

What if there was no such thing as a hypothetical situation?

Oh, that's right. Sorry. Do you think the gut would decompose immediately or would it last a little while, till you hooked a nice tuna, say?

and the OP is actually stuck on the island with only natural gut, leather grips, 4GLTE and an iPhone5

I don't know about the strings but I do know that I would never eat the leather grip. Leather is normally tanned with chemicals that are poisonous if ingested.

Surely you're using them as materials in binding your raft together...

Salt water island or fresh water island?

What freshwater island do you know of that you couldn't just swim back from?

Distance is not always the problem. Cold water might be.
There is an island in the middle of that lake in Siberia, the one gulag escapees always have to skirt around. A former g/f told me she trained it like 3,000 miles to see, from Warsaw. It's famous because lots of escapees are Polish, stuck in some gulag in Siberia.
I'm not a good swimmer, so anything more than Alcatraz might be beyond my ability.
If you were stuck in England, you might not make it to the mainland.

LeeD, have you ever swim to Alcatraz?
There's a guy who swim to the island every morning before sunrise. Even in the winter. Crazy.

I tend to use poly or co-poly strings, can't afford natgut. I think my prostaff has a leather grip under the softer one I have put over it. I don't buy anything with leather incl shoes/belts/wallets, but i am not gonna rip of the leather grip off my scarce prostaffs.

Did any one you see that movie "Life of Pi" ?

I did. It was awesome!

All the swims are AWAY from Alcatraz. Think about it. If you swim TO Alcatraz, and it's a hair over 1.5 miles, when you arrive, wouldn't you be cold and in need of hot drink, towell, and a rest?
That doesn't exist THERE.
If you jump off a boat and swim to AquaticPark, hot drink, towells, and hot showers are awaiting.
I already said I'm a weak swimmer. Longest swims are outside Sloat on a 17' day, to shore, which took maybe 1/2 hour total.

this guy swim "to" Alcatraz
I used to watch him all the time
there's a little boat that follows right behind him
I'd be on Embarcadero early in the morning before sunrise jogging and there he is jumping in the freezing water in the dark

Use the natural gut to create a fishing pole or even use it as a binding material for a hut and eventually a boat off the island.

Use the leather grip as a strap in case you cut yourself on a sharp rock, have to amputate your infected arm, and biting on it to dull the pain.

Use the tennis bag's shoe bag as a waterproof bag to hold salt water to distill it into freshwater.


You should have included a tennis racquet in the survival package, coconut tennis :)