Virginia (Ginny) Oliver started laying lobster pots with her father when she was aged eight and now, at 101 years, she is still heading out with her 78-year-old son three times a week to snare the large marine crustaceans.
“I’ve done it all my life, so I might as well keep doing it,” she said.
With her husband Bill, Ginny started catching lobster off the rocky coast of Rockland, Maine, New England, after the end of World War II.
“When I started out with lobstering, no women ever went. That was just the way I lived,” she says.
“We lobstered up until he was 90. I could run the boat, and he always told everybody I was the boss! I think he’s right!”
Today she continues lobster fishing on that same boat, named Virginia, now with her son Max by her side. They head out three times a week.
“I’m still the boss,” she said.
“Sometimes I’ve gotten wet to the gills, but I never get seasick.”
Now she’s the oldest lobster fisher in the state and possibly the oldest one in the world. The lobster industry has changed over the course of Oliver’s time on the water, with lobsters having grown from a working class food to a delicacy. The lobsters fetched 28 cents a pound on the docks when she first starting trapping them; now it’s 15 times that.
Good on you, Ginny.
