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NEWPORT BEACH — It was a few minutes into the annual competition at Harbor Day School, and the referee called last year’s winner up to the stage. The reigning champion strolled quietly to the front — crawling out from under the table in back, since she was boxed in on both sides — then sat down in a chair and began to recite.

Her right foot bounced impatiently on the carpet while her fingers played with a pink bracelet. She kept her gaze tilted toward the floor. Out of her mouth came a steady stream of numbers, delivered so fast at times that they nearly became a blur. Two dozen students and teachers stared at Jamie Searles in fascination and waited for her to miss a step.

Finally, she missed one — after she had recited 656 digits of pi, breaking her own record by more than 100.

A moment later, Jamie had another try and completed her set goal: 801 digits with pinpoint accuracy. The sixth-grader won a free lunch, a night without math homework and a renewed title as the Pi Queen of Harbor Day.

“For the first 100 [digits], I don’t even know what I’m saying,” said Jamie, 12, who started memorizing pi in the second grade. “It’s like the ABCs. It just comes out.”

Harbor Day celebrates Pi Day every March 14 — or 3/14, in honor of the most perplexing number in mathematics. Pi, defined by the ancient Greeks, is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. The number rounds off to 3.14, but presumably continues infinitely.

What’s more, there’s no pattern to the digits — at least none detected yet. When Harbor Day students gathered in the conference room to compete on Wednesday, then, they had nothing to fall back on but razor-sharp memories.

“A lot of those top kids, there’s something about their brains that gets revealed with this,” said head of school Douglas Phelps. “But for a lot of them, it’s just pure enjoyment.”

The contestants on Pi Day, some as young as the second grade, got two chances to cover as many pi digits as they could. Students who nailed more than 40 digits got homework passes, while 100 or more netted a free lunch in the near future.

Teacher Meggen Stockstill, who served as referee, added some other fun touches. To start the competition, students sang an ode to the tune of “Oh Christmas Tree” — “Oh number pi, oh number pi / Your digits are unending” — while participants snacked on real pies that students had brought from home.

After the contest, Jamie said she had been studying pi daily for only the last two weeks. She plans to return to Harbor Day this fall as a seventh-grader, but hasn’t decided how many digits to shoot for in March.

This year, she had aimed to memorize 750 digits and topped herself by 51.

Even still, Jamie added, her memory isn’t infallible.

“Sometimes if I’m out with my friends, I forget to call my mom and tell her where we are,” she admitted. “And I’m really bad with getting parent signatures.”

Click here to see video of Jamie Searles’ championship pi recitation.