Ask any of the members of the Ledyard High School’s National Ocean Sciences Bowl team about memorable moments from their performance at the Quahog Bowl on Feb. 4, and they’ll all laugh and look at senior Jenna McHale.

As fellow teammate and senior Sam Beacham explained, the team was winning by four points on the final question of the competition when McHale buzzed in early and interrupted the question being read. If she had gotten it wrong, the team would have been docked four points for the interruption to wind up in a tie with E.O. Smith.

“This was, like, the last six seconds of the game,” Beacham said. “The whole crowd was audibly gasping.”

McHale got the question right, stunning the crowd.

“I spent hours making notecards and none of them were actually showing up in the questions, so I got really excited that one of them was, and I didn’t wait,” she said.

The LHS team, made of Beacham, McHale, seniors Kelly Banach and Hannah Roediger and sophomore Eric Banach, won first place at the Quahog Bowl.

The regional competition of the National Ocean Sciences Bowl is composed of 16 Connecticut and Rhode Island teams and is held annually at the Avery Point campus of the University of Connecticut. Connecticut Sea Grant organizes and sponsors the competition.

Biology teacher and adviser David Bednarz said that while some schools struggle to field a team of five students to compete, Ledyard had 13 this year, taking up an entire row in the auditorium as they watched to support their teammates.

The 2012 team also placed first at the Quahog Bowl and won the sportsmanship award at the national competition in Baltimore. The school has consistently placed highly at the Avery Point competition.

The competition is held Jeopardy-style, with topics in biology, physics, geology and other issues pertaining to marine science. Kelly Banach, who competed in last year’s competition as well, said the studying can be stressful to start, but it gets better as the competition goes on.

“We were all really freaked out about it, but once you get going, you gain confidence in yourself and you realize... if we really want this, we can pull it off,” she said.

Bednarz said the questions can be tricky, even for students in the UConn Early College Experience Marine Science class at the school, but the kids are well-prepared. McHale said one of the questions in the team challenge portion of the competition was one of the questions they had studied the night before, and Roediger said another question was similar to a question on her midterms.

“It was the coolest thing because we were just rattling out answers,” Roediger said. “It just shows you how well this class prepares you for Ocean Bowl. It pays off.”

Ledyard will compete against other regional winners at the 20th Annual National Ocean Sciences Bowl in Corvallis, Oregon, in April.

a.hutchinson@theday.com