LEE COUNTY, Fla. - Talk about a fish tale! A 200-pound, unwelcome visitor leaps onto a Cape Coral couple's boat.

It could have been a potentially deadly accident. Last year, a Michigan woman was killed after a stingray hit her after it jumped into her boat in the Keys, and a stingray encounter is just what happened to the Cape Coral couple while boating through islands near the Sanibel Causeway. Luckily this time, nobody was hurt.

"It landed on the floor of the boat and it slid to the driver's area. I mean, it's wingspan was like this," Emily Keas says as she stretches out her arms.

Emily and her husband Terry have taken their boat out every week for the past nine years and have never seen anything quite like this.

"I thought one of us was going to be a goner," Emily says.

A 200-pound, spotted eagle ray soared right out of the water and straight into their boat.

"If we'd have been going fast, it surely would have broken the windshield and just come on through," Terry says.

"It was really a scary feeling for a while because I knew the barb was poisonous," Emily says of Thursday's encounter. "Its tail was 4-5 feet long, whipping all around, so finally I just started screaming for help and waving my hands."

That caught the Coast Guard's attention.

"I don't know what we would have done if we were all alone. It took four of the U.S. Coast Guard to get it out," Emily says.

They cut off the barb before hoisting the ray back into the water. The ray lost two bands of teeth in the ordeal, which like the barb, will grow back.

"In retrospect, I remember it's cute little face and it's big ol' eyes and it was so cute!" Emily says. "I hope it's OK and survives."

While flying fish might sound crazy, it's not uncommon.

"It's just something they do," Gregg Poulaski, of the Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission, says. "We don't understand a lot about them but they do breech the water fairly regularly."

Fish and Wildlife says the Keas' boat probably startled the eagle ray and that's why it jumped. But, if you're at the beach, it's always a good idea to do the sting ray shuffle so you don't scare them into stinging you.

"It's a defense mechanism," Poulaski says. "They're not looking to sting you."

And for that, the Keas say they're lucky.

"It does make you realize how fragile life is and how you should enjoy it every day because you never know what's going to happen," Emily says.

The stingray also made quite an impression on the Keas' 3-year-old Jack Russell Terrier. "Jack" was also on board when the ray landed on the boat.

"He was shaking as much as I was," Emily says.