i hope you're wrong!! i love saltfork!! i know nothing about vhs but that looks nasty...

 

I hope you contacted someone and sent the fish to be tested, just to be sure. Of course, I would have waited for the results before announcing to the world the Salt Fork has been infected. That could actually be a number of different things, not just VSH, but it certainly needs to be verified.

 

unfortunately i didnt send the fish. I didnt know the symptoms of the disease until later that night when i was looking up symptoms of different diseases. I hope that's not what it was, but from all the pictures i looked at of saugeye and walleye that were infected, it looks very much the same.

 

VHS is a coldwater disease and isn't at all likely to be active by August. You'll mostly see it in the spring and very, very rarely in the fall. Also, most of the hemorrhaging associated with VHS will be internal and mostly visible externally in the eyes, fin margins, gills, etc. The appearance of bruising along the body is a relatively common symptom, but I'd expect other evidence of bleeding to be even more visible. Of course, I can't know without more proper testing by a proper lab set up to do such work--like the Ohio Dept. of Agriculture, US Fish & Wildlife Service, or University of Toledo--but given the circumstances, I suspect this guy's malady is not likely to be VHS.