603 United is beneficiary partner for 6th annual Dragon Boat Festival

WEIRS BEACH — The 6th annual Dragon Boat Festival will take over Paugus Bay, hosted by the Laconia Rotary Club, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 19.

The holiday, also known as the Duanwu Festival, is celebrated on the fifth day of the fifth month of the Chinese lunar calendar, to memorialize Chinese scholar Qu Yuan.

Thousands of Dragon Boat Festivals happen across the world, including right here in Laconia. Teams can sign up to race a 40-foot, narrow boat on Paugus Bay, with no experience needed.

The event will be held at The NASWA Resort. The first festival was held in Weirs Bay, in 2021, raising $37,000 for Gilda’s Club New Hampshire, affiliated with the Cancer Support Community. Due to high winds, the second festival moved to Paugus Bay, and has remained there since.

“The most remarkable thing is I've been involved in a lot of other activities with other groups, but in this one when people walk onto the beach, the teams come, and their faces are so happy, and they haven't even done anything yet. They're smiling, and they're laughing, and it just makes you feel so good,” said Pat Anderson, president of Laconia Rotary Club.

Participants will start at the beach, completing a racecourse roughly two football fields long, which typically takes 1 to 2 minutes to reach the finish line. Each team will race a minimum of three times throughout the day. Boats will be provided by 22Dragons, a dragon boat club out of Montreal, who will also provide participants with practice races and safety equipment.

Teams are made up of 16 paddlers, although it's recommended to have a team roster of about 20. Six paddlers must be women, not including the singular drummer, and one steerperson. 22Dragons can provide a steerperson if there is not an experienced one on the team, standing at the rear of the dragon boat to control direction and oversee the crew.

For their beneficiary this year, the Rotary Club chose 603 United, a nonprofit organization providing social activities for adults with and without intellectual disabilities.

The nonprofit was started by Executive Director Cassie Contigiani, as part of her senior class project in 2015, at Belmont High School. For her project, she organized the Lakes Region Unified Basketball Jamboree.

“Parents were coming up and hugging and crying and saying 'thank you.' And I was barely 18 at that point. So, I'm like, 'Why is everybody coming up to me?'” Contigiani said. “And it finally clicked that it was the first time for some of them that they got to be at school on the weekend, and not worry about where their son or daughter is, because they were with a teacher, or a coach.”

Anderson said the past several partners for the Dragon Boat Festival have been organizers serving people with cancer, so they wanted to do something a little bit different.

“We're extremely honored to have been chosen for this. Our community has been the backbone to everything. Our original space was in a little office, so we couldn't host anything. And if we didn't have the community to open up their doors and welcome us, we wouldn't have been able to do anything to begin with. So, just having the community's backing has been huge. And the Rotary has been a big part of that since the beginning,” Contigiani said.

The nonprofit formed in June 2022, and Contigiani said she just hired her second employee in January. After moving out of their roughly 600-square-foot office, 603 United is now sitting more comfortably in a roughly 7,000-square-foot space at Belknap Marketplace in Belmont. Currently, they have about 110 club members, 50 volunteers, and eight board members.

Contigiani said a crew from 603 United will be practicing with participants on Friday, and racing on Saturday. Although she grew up in the area, Contigiani has never seen a race in person, and is looking forward to the event.

Contigiani said one of the organization’s volunteers reached out to Nault’s Powersports for a donation to the raffle at the Dragon Boat Festival. The business is donating a utility-recreation vehicle — the 2026 Brute Force 3000 — for the event. All proceeds from the raffle will directly benefit 603 United’s programs and social activities.

Throughout the festival, folks can head to The NASWA Resort for food and beverages. As they usually do for the event, The NASWA will offer 15% off for a two-night stay with code DRAGON. or calling to make a reservation.

There are two divisions, sport and community teams. Sport teams will race in their own event, as they practice outside of the Dragon Boat Festival. Community teams are made up of people with little or no experience racing, with teams typically consisting of coworkers, neighbors, or nonprofit members and volunteers.

Registrations by Tuesday, Sept. 15, at laconiarotary.org/page/laconia-rotary-dragon-boat-festival.