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The news spread ashore like bait fish into the wash. Men came running into the shops along the barrier islands, from Manteo to Morehead City. The greatest run of puppy drum in anyone’s memory was beginning just offshore.

They used words like “epic” and “historic” to describe the action, and most everyone who was down there in the past couple of weeks seemed to agree that it was the best in our lifetime. “You could see them in the waves,” said Frank Folb, the owner of Frank and Fran’s, a tackle shop in Avon.

Great schools of pups acres wide rolled up and down in the surf, great red spots in the swells unlike anything surf fishermen have ever seen, a run of drum for the ages. They said it was like something out of an angler’s dreams.

More than 600 nautical miles away, the fish were washing up onto the shore. Marine biologists and wildlife experts came out of the flats and estuaries of the Everglades and told the stories to anyone who would listen. The greatest fish kill in anyone’s memory was happening in the channels just outside of Miami.

They used words like “cemetery” and “epidemic” to describe what one biologist said was a kill so large he didn’t want to venture a guess as to how much damage was done.

“The channels became a tomb,” biologist Jerry Ault told the Miami Herald.

Acres of bonefish and snook, weakfish and snapper, lapped against the shorelines, great swaths of water surface covered in dead fish like something out of an angler’s nightmare.

They were talking about it all this week as anglers and exhibitors set up at the annual Central Carolina Boat and Fishing Show at the Greensboro Coliseum. They’re talking about it all up and down the Eastern Seaboard, one of the greatest fishing weeks in history and one of the greatest fish kills in history, in the same week.

Nature makes no sense sometimes.

Folb sat in his bait shop and listened to the tales, marveling at the number of men who came from miles and miles away to get in on a run of drum that he wasn’t sure was even possible.

“I would say it’s probably the best in the 30 some years I’ve been on Hatteras Island,” said Folb, who grew up in Winston-Salem. “We had people driving up and down the coast, looking out in the water. They would see the fish in the surf, get out and cast, drive down a little further until they saw more fish, then they’d cast out, catch fish and ride on down the beach.”

The puppy drum is a young red drum, our state fish, a bronze beauty of a fish that generally weighs about five or 10 pounds. Full grown, the fish also known as a channel bass or redfish, can grow in excess of 50 pounds. The world record red drum was caught off Hatteras in 1984. It weighed more than 94 pounds.

When the drum are running Down East, word spreads quickly.

The word out of Florida wasn’t so good last week. As water temperatures dipped to all-time lows, great fish kills began in the channels cut out from the Everglades and in Florida Bay. Water temperatures dipped below 48 degrees for the first time in recorded history, and the fish began to die in great numbers.

Biologists reported pilchard and grunt washing up on the shores, giant tarpon and even moray eels dying as the cold water washed off the flats and into the deep channels where anglers come from all over the world to catch record snook, bonefish and permit.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission immediately put emergency measures into place, closing fisheries and sending biologists into the areas to look for the outbreak of diseases that would worsen the situation.

And still, the waves to the north carried in more and more puppy drum.

“It was colder than crap here,” said Folb. “After the warm weather cleared out, they were still catching fish. You couldn’t throw a hook out there without snagging one. People had a hard time leaving. It was incredible.”

Nature’s cruel irony is sometimes hard to figure. So is man’s. A movie is being debuted this week in Wilmington, a film called “Redfish Can’t Jump,” a work described as a thing of beauty, an homage to our state fish. The film also suggests we might be in danger of over-fishing for our beloved drum.

In light of the incredible run of pups Down East the past two weeks, the movie is timely and somewhat ironic in its message. More than 600 nautical miles away, the fish kill has had an interesting effect on other species, too. The invasive exotic fish and species such as the snakehead and walking catfish are dying, too, accomplishing something biologists up and down the Eastern Seaboard had struggled with for years.

Nature’s irony sometimes ebbs and sometimes flows. She gives and she takes, and sometimes man has no control over either.

Contact Ed Hardin at 373-7069 or ed.hardin@news-record.com