I have seen catfish swim along the surface, not very often, but you probably did see a large 10 to 12 pound catfish poke it's snout out of the water. I've caught them on Jitterbugs at Laguna Lake. Way back in 1969 we had record rains that lasted an entire month. The Lake Irvine dam overflowed into Santiago Creek and all kinds of big catfish, bass and crappie got washed out of the lake.. A couple of us went down into the deeper holes in the creek and netted and snagged lots of fish and put them big ice boxes with water and drove them up to Fullerton and let them go into laguna Lake. We made several trips and it was a lot of hard work. Those fish would have died because the creek dried up pretty fast. Laguna Lake had some very good fishing after that with some big fish caught!