Even at 101, she’s still got it all!

Meet Virginia Oliver who started trapping lobster off Maine’s rocky coast, when World War II was a distant event in the future, and women harvesting lobsters was a rare sighting.

Almost a century later at age 101, she’s still doing it. The oldest lobster fisher in the state and perhaps the oldest one in the world, Oliver still patiently tends to her traps with her 78-year-old son Max.

She started at age 8, and nowadays she catches them using a boat that once belonged to her late husband and bears her own name, the “Virginia.” She has no plans to stop, but she expressed her concerns for the health of Maine’s lobster population, which she said is subject to heavy fishing pressure these days.

“I’ve done it all my life, so I might as well keep doing it,” Oliver said.

The lobster industry has changed over the years and lobsters have grown from a working-class food to a delicacy today. Wire traps have now replaced her beloved old wooden ones, which these days are used as kitsch in seafood restaurants.

Some of the other aspects, though, are especially similar. Oliver’s still loading pogeys — lobster-speak for menhaden, a small fish — into traps to lure them in. And she’s still waking up long before dawn to get on the boat and do it all.

Source: Agencies