Kerri (Gallagher) Fowler is not a big woman, she’s five-foot-six-inches and usually weighs about 120 pounds. Still, every summer for the past three years she has slogged 15-pound bags of ice, 30 pounds of Angus beef, countless hotdogs and bits of steak down to the river.
She gets it all to the water’s edge and then hauls the coolers over to her 20-foot pontoon moored offshore in a pram (a small, stable fishing boat with a square bow). She gets a lot of exercise.
Fowler runs a floating burger/hot dog/steak kebab business on the Merrimack River, on weekends. It is called the Tidal Café.
“This would be my fourth summer, if not for “this” she indicates her enlarged midsection. Fowler is pregnant, which ordinarily would not stop her from going out; it didn’t stop her when she was pregnant with her 19-month-old son, Kaiden.
But this time she is pregnant with twins, and with the high-risk pregnancy, she has opted to turn the grilling over to someone else for this summer only.
Even if it’s choppy, she cooks up the burgers, hot dogs and kebabs on a grill and sells them to boaters from the middle of the channel, opposite Butler’s Toothpick.
“The boat actually prohibits me from doing more,” she says. “If I had a big houseboat or a barge, it would be awesome.”
Kerri Gallagher, as she was then, grew up on Plum Island from age 10. She had spent most, if not every summer, on the island before that, though fishing on the river with her father, whose parents have a house on the river side of the island.
It was there that the two thought it would be so great if someone would come out to them on the boat, with food.
“Being out on the water all the time, we always bring a couple of bags of chips and some Cokes,” she explains. But no one wants to go back to shore to get a more substantial bite to eat. And thus was born the Tidal Cafe.
Read the rest of Kerri’s story in this week’s SeaCoast Scene.
