Amid the doomsday predictions that typically arrive with the tropical weather pattern El Niño is some good news:

Swimmers these days can frolic in the normally chilly ocean waters off West Marin, and albacore tuna are being caught closer to Marin's coast than ever.

The waters off West Marin usually read about 55 degrees, but thermometers at Tomales Point and Bolinas this week have risen to 64 degrees.

"The albacore are running," said Stan Lawson of Lawson's Resort in Dillon Beach on Wednesday. "My cousin got 40 the other day, and somebody else got 120. This is definitely the result of El Niño."

Bolinas fisherman Josh Churchman said he knows somebody in Bolinas who recently pulled in 70 albacore, a warm-water fish more at home off Southern California. He added that large fishing boats close to the shoreline are hauling in catches of up to 500 tuna at a time.

"There are tuna closer than they've been in more than 15 years," Churchman said, "closer than they were in '82 and '83. I heard they are closer than the Farallones," which are 18 miles off Point Reyes.

El Niño - the movement of warm tropical waters to the Northern hemisphere - is a cyclical phenomenon. The last severe El Niño conditions occurred in 1982 and 1983, when catastrophic winter storms battered West Marin and rendered Inverness an official disaster area.

Some meteorologists have predicted that this winter's storms will be as severe or worse than the storms in the early 1980s.