101-year-old fisherwoman still catching Atlantic lobsters after nine decades
Virginia Oliver picked her first snapping lobster out of the Atlantic in 1928 – and she’s still at it.
The 101-year-old has been looking for shellfish off the coast of New England since she was a little girl and still very much has her sea legs.
With the help of her son Max, 78, she continues to head out on the water, come rain or shine, and may just well be the oldest fisher in the world.
Virginia has been tending to her traps off the coast of Rockland, Maine, her whole life and has no plans to stop.
Speaking from a boat that bears her name, she said: ‘I’ve done it all my life, so I might as well keep doing it.’
When she first started catching lobsters, they fetched a price of 28 cents back on the dock market.
Now it’s 15 times that, and with prices at record highs, customers in some upmarket New England beach towns are paying more than 30 dollars for a lobster roll.
Virginia is still getting up before dawn to load small fish into traps to lure the lobsters in, following in her father’s footsteps who spent his life working in the industry.
After nine decades, she still enjoys ‘being her own boss’ and says she intends to ‘keep right on doing it’.
She’s also not averse to a lobster dinner herself, averaging around one a week.
It’s not without its risks: Virginia is in charge of ‘banding’ the lobsters, sliding a piece of rubber around the razor sharp claws.
But her most serious injury came from another catch, a crab who’d have much preferred to have stayed in the water.
Virginia said: ‘I was saving crabs one day and it reached out and bit my little finger – if it hadn’t been for a bone at the end of it…it’d have chewed it right off’
‘I had to go and have seven stitches taken in it. The doctor said “what are you doing out there anyway”’.
‘That kind of teed me off and I said ‘well, that’s because I want to do it’.
She told an Associated Press reporter: ‘I like doing it, I like being along the water. And so I’m going to keep on doing it just as long as I can.’
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