Now that April Jones has had a couple of days to think about her family’s bizarre encounter with a spotted eagle ray during the 2022 Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo, there’s plenty of sympathy to go around.

“We were both in the wrong place at the wrong time,” she said of the incident, which sent her to the emergency room and caused the ray to lose four pups.

Photos of the ray sprawled in the back of the Jones’ boat went viral over the weekend. The real excitement was in how it got there.

Jones, her husband Jeremy Jones, their eight-year-old son Gunner and her husband’s grandfather were out in waters off the Sand Island lighthouse on Friday, fishing in the first day of the rodeo. “I wasn’t catching anything,” said Jones. “We were trying to get me a fish for the rodeo.”

That’s important. A ticketholder who weighs in a legal fish in any of the rodeo’s categories is entered in a prize drawing. It’s nice to catch something big, but you need to catch something. “I told my husband I was ready to go from that spot and try somewhere else,” she said. “We were leaving that spot and he had just got the boat up to a speed where it was leveled out.”

Then, wham!

“I thought we hit a wave,” Jones said. “Water came in, I felt something hit me. I told my husband I must have blacked out for a second, because I didn’t know what was going on, anything like that, and I hear banging and clanging in the back of the boat. My son was screaming, my husband was like, ‘What is that?’ His grandfather was in the back with him. They were freaking out, wondering what it was. The three of them thought it was a shark, I didn’t know what it was, I just saw a blob.”

A moment chaos ensued. They had a large ray in the boat, hundreds of pounds of thrashing muscle. “She was flapping around in the boat trying to get out,” said Jones. Once the animal got itself wedged into a spot in the back, things weren’t much better. They found it too heavy to lift easily, in part because it was still agitated, and they could see the venomous spines near the base of its tail. “She’s on the back of the boat, there are waves coming into the boat,” Jones said. “We didn’t know if it was going to sink or not. It’s a small boat.”

Eventually they got under way and Jones’ husband carefully motored to the boat launch at Dauphin Island’s east end. She ran to the Dauphin Island Sea Lab for help. But the time she got back, bystanders had helped move the ray into the water. She appeared to recover and swim off. But four babies found under her in the boat were dead.

Jones’s day of fishing was over. She went to the ER for a look at her bruised shoulder. “I feel like I’m pretty tough … My shoulder was kind of swollen up and I was in quite a bit of pain. I think once the adrenaline wore off, that’s when the pain hit,” she said. “I told the Emergency Room people, no one’s going to believe this, but I have pictures.”

Jones said she’s surprised by how much attention those pictures got online. Some people were quick to theorize the party had hooked the ray and hauled it into the boat, she said.

“If we couldn’t get it out of the boat because of its weight, we couldn’t get it in the boat because of its weight,” she said.

This isn’t the first time this has happened; spotted eagle rays are, in fact, frequent fliers — and sometimes this leads to unfortunate interactions with moving boats. A 2008 incident in the Florida Keys made national news when a woman riding in a moving boat was killed by an impact with a jumping ray. (The ray also died.)

That ray weighed just 75 pounds, according to reports at the time. Brian Jones, senior aquarist at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab’s Estuarium, said that based on Jones’ photos this one could easily have weighed 300, maybe more.

Brian Jones was one of the people from the Sea Lab who came to the boat after April Jones came running for help. He got there a little too late to see the mother ray in person but was able to bring the dead pups back to the Estuarium for study and display.

Brian Jones said spotted eagle rays are rare in local waters and are protected by Alabama, though they’re more common in the Caribbean and other waters to the south. Though he’s only seen a few of them in 25 years at the Estuarium, he said he wasn’t surprised to hear of leaping high enough to land in a boat.

“The nature of large rays like this is to sometimes go airborne,” he said.

Several different scenarios have been observed, he said. A ray fleeing a predator such as a shark may put on a burst of speed, leap clear of the water and soar up to 40 feet through the air before splashing back down. “It’s very much a jump with strong intention,” he said. A ray can also skitter across the surface rather than going fully ballistic.

Rays also make near-vertical jumps, Brian Jones said. For some species, at some times, this may be social behavior, he said. It can seem playful. But rays also will sometimes leap up and do a back flop or a belly flop, trying to shake off parasites. The Jones family has mentioned finding a remora in the boat, suggesting this ray was trying to dislodge an unwanted passenger.

“I really think that’s what happened with that ray,” said Brian Jones. “It had no idea that boat was there.”

It’s hard to say whether the death of the four ray pups was caused by the impact or the exposure after their delivery. April Jones said on Facebook that her son “cried and cried” about them.

Ray eggs hatch within the mother’s body and are carried for a while longer before being delivered. Brian Jones said that while these may have looked fully formed, he couldn’t say how close they were to being ready for birth.

It’s a shame they didn’t survive the encounter, but “we’re making lemonade out of lemons,” he said. The pups will be preserved and become displays at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab, alongside exhibits that include live cownose rays, Atlantic stingrays and bluntnose stingrays. One of them probably will be added to the exhibits in the Sea Lab’s touring classroom, the BayMobile, meaning students all over the state will get a look.

Brian Jones added that a ray such as the one that landed in the Jones’ boat may live for decades, so the ray likely will bear other litters.

April Jones said some online commenters have blamed her family for the pups’ death, and some have gone so far as to say they wished she had died instead. “It’s crazy that people could say that out loud, or type it,” she said.

As for her and her family, it’s been an eye-opening experience about life on the Gulf Coast. She grew up crabbing and fishing in coastal Louisiana, but the family only moved here about a year ago after living in Missouri. They were drawn to the Mobile area in part by the proximity to family and in part by the reputation of the schools in Saraland, where they now live.

This was their first time fishing the rodeo in their own boat, after a couple of years when they visited and rode along with friends or relatives.

And yes, she did go fishing again on Saturday and she did catch a fish to weigh in. Not everybody was crazy about the idea of getting back on the boat, so she fished from a pier and caught a black drum.

That was enough to get her in the rodeo prize drawing. But she knows it’s not the fish people will be talking about years later.

“It still blows my mind this even happened,” she said.