Megan Potter mustered all of her strength to swim through 10-foot swells as the boat she had spent the summer on slowly sank into the frigid water of the Bering Sea off Alaska’s Aleutian Islands.

A Quechee resident and University of Connecticut student, she had spent the last two months on the Ambition, her father’s boat, ferrying thousands of pounds of salmon from fishing boats to canneries on the Alaskan shore. Now, with her family scattered in the water around her, Megan started to panic. Her rescuers were on another fishing boat, the Star Watcher, some 100 yards away.

Megan, a 2014 Hartford High School graduate, had been working alongside her father, Corey; mother, Maybe; brother, Kyle; and a family friend, Erin Tortolano, on the 75-foot fish transport boat.

Recently, she recalled the dramatic events of July 23, an afternoon she will never forget.

The crew was 17 hours into a trip from Port Moller, on one side of the Aleutian Island chain, to King Cove, on the other, carrying about 180,000 pounds of salmon. They had only about four hours to go when Megan was stirred from a late afternoon nap by her brother, who had graduated from Hartford High in 2012.

Something was wrong with the boat, he told her urgently. Corey Potter, who grew up in Pomfret and worked as a contractor in the Upper Valley, needed her help on the back deck.

“My dad said something was not right,” Potter said. “He had an uneasy feeling. Something was not sitting right.”

The back of the boat was riding lower than it should be and the boat was taking on more water than could be drained out by the pumps. Water began to pour over the rails.

The boat started leaning to the left, so they moved a crane from the port side of the boat to the right, or starboard, side.

“That didn’t really help,” Megan said. “We were listing to one side.”

Survival Suits

In the boat’s wheelhouse, Megan found her mother.

“My mom is sitting on the floor, holding down a pump switch, and she’s crying. And I look at my dad who’s sitting in the captain’s chair. He is shaking his head.”

Corey Potter helped his daughter focus by looking directly at her and giving specific instructions.

“It was weird, I just felt a sense of calmness,” Megan said. “I just wanted to figure out what the problem was.”

As the boat’s warning alarms began to sound, Corey Potter told his family to put on their survival suits — big, orange, top-to-bottom coverings that protect the wearer from the cold Alaskan waters, which are about 40 degrees at the surface at that time of year.

On the radio, he put out a “mayday” distress call.

An animal science major who played soccer and lacrosse and ran track at Hartford High, Megan grew up with her father spending summers on fishing boats in Alaska. He had worked on the boats for more than 30 summers, and for the last three she had joined him.

In the years she had been helping him, Corey Potter had taught her a lot, such as how boats create sinkholes when they slip under water — if people or another boat are too close, they get sucked down with it.

That could have happened to the Star Watcher, the fishing boat that was closest to the Ambition as it took on water. As the Star Watcher approached, Corey Potter made the decision to abandon ship — everybody but the captain.

The order prompted a quick exchange between the captain and his son.

“Kyle’s like, ‘No way, I’m not going in if you’re not going in,’ ” Corey said.

Megan and the rest of the crew went to the back of the boat, which was now nearly under water.

In his deepest, loudest voice, her father ordered Potter and Erin Tortolano, a 2013 Woodstock High graduate, to go first.

“You girls in the water, now!” he yelled.

Her mom and brother went next, and her father went last.

In the water, Megan thought about sinkholes and getting pulled under by a sinking ship. She could no longer make eye contact with her father.

“I look down into the water and it’s dark, deep, 75 feet down,” she said. “And you don’t know what’s down there.”

An Island Rescue

In the frantic moments after abandoning ship, the rising and falling waves made it difficult for Corey Potter to see any of his family members, bobbing in the freezing water.

“The currents were pushing us all apart,” he recalled. “Every time I hit the crest of the wave, I could see and hear.”

Although the Star Watcher was in view, Megan was starting to get nervous.

A crew member of the Star Watcher threw a life ring to her, but it fell short.

“That’s when I started to freak,” Megan said. “I was flailing. I started screaming.”

The crew told her to float on her back, and she did. From that vantage point, she could then see that another life ring had been thrown, this time too far. Kyle, her brother, now on the rescue boat, had thrown it.

“It’s better to overshoot, because I can grab the line,” Megan Potter realized. She grabbed the rope and they pulled her in. Cold water slapped her as she was dragged up and down through the waves, her body tossed from side to side.

“I land face first on the deck,” Megan said.

Within minutes, all the Potters, and Tortolano, were safely on board the Star Watcher. The ordeal didn’t end there.

“They didn’t go from bad to good, they went from bad to stranded,” said Cmdr. James Binniker of the U.S. Coast Guard, Sector Anchorage.

The family spent the next five days at the closest port, False Pass, a remote spot on the Aleutian Islands, wearing borrowed clothes while waiting for a plane to pick them up. Megan had lost her MacBook computer, her camera, her lenses, her GoPro camera and “half my closet” in the sunken boat, she said.

Finally, on July 28, a plane arrived and took the Potters and Tortolano inland, where they went to the airport and took a commercial flight home.

The Coast Guard has called the boat’s sinking last month a “serious marine incident” and is investigating, said Binniker. Such investigations typically take 6-8 months.

In the meantime, Potter will have something to talk about when she returns to UConn, where classes started Monday — her 20th birthday.

“I’m still trying to process it myself,” she said, looking back on an unbelievable summer. “I can’t believe I survived this.”

That’s not to say the Potter family, which is back in New England, has given up summers in the Bering Sea, she said.

“We’re already looking at boats,” Megan said.

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