October 2, 2020 — “I picked up the chalk,” says Bonnie Brady. “That was the end of my life.” Twenty years later, Brady, 57, recalls the meeting that changed the course of her life and put a scrappy journalist on her path as a doggedly determined advocate for fishermen and ocean habitat.
“I had never really paid attention to the fishing thing,” Brady adds. She came to fishing through marriage after landing in Montauk, N.Y., an iconic Long Island fishing town.
Like many community fisheries advocates, she recalls that time of her life via council proceedings: “It was around 2000, Amendment 13” to the Northeast Multispecies Fishery Management Plan.
“Dave was out fishing, and he said, ‘Can you go to this meeting and find out what happens?’” Brady adds that once she got to the fishermen’s forum hosted by the Cornell Cooperative Extension, the room was awash with a range of complaints from a crowd of fishermen. She stood up, grabbed the chalk and started to ask questions. “If you were to list the top five problems, what are they? I put myself in the middle. Being a reporter, I wanted to see what the main points were. It was obvious these guys had real issues. I had never paid attention to any of that before I met Dave.”
Brady married Montauk fisherman Dave Aripotch in 1998. “He’s a trawler — fluke, scup, black sea bass, squid, whiting. He used to groundfish, but he leases his quota now,” Brady says. “He started going offshore gillnetting when he was 15. He would sneak off unbeknownst to his parents. He would take off for a couple of weeks!”