MG39, you've just touched on one of the great mysteries surrounding menhaden in Maine. Conventional wisdom and most magazine articles suggest that they make excellent bait and stripers routinely feed on the large schools. I've only had luck on chunked pogies and haven't seen schools of stripers attacking them en masse. I know they do to the south, but for some reason in Maine it's different.
Like most things, it's more complicated than meets the eye. The Atlantic States Maritime Service sets the total allowable catch (TAC) for the entire east coast. A portion of the TAC is allocated to the State. Fishermen participate in different categories of fishing based on the scale of their effort. The largest boats are limited more so by the State's management of the TAC than their daily limits, which are enormous. When a certain amount of the TAC is caught, the largest scale fishery is shutdown. There is a smaller scale fishery that is allowed to continue with a limit of 6,000 lbs per day. This wouldn't really pay the bills for the largest boats, but might make sense for lobstermen trying to catch their own bait, with possibly some extra to sell to their friends. What's crazy is that the State is allocated a VERY small portion of the Menhaden (pogie) TAC compared to the mid Atlantic States and one company called Omega Protein. Omega Protein harvests pogies on an enormous scale and uses them for fish meal, cosmetics and other products. In other words, recreational fishermen love to look around at a lobstermen using a small gill net or seine and say "see they're catching all the pogies and the stripers and tuna aren't going to have anythinng left to eat!" When you could point to the larger boats as the ones who are 'catching all the fish' it's actually the other states and particularly Omega responsible for the lions share of the harvest. This year the herring TAC was cut significantly, so it's likely that more and more lobstermen will be trying to catch their own bait. https://www.maine.gov/dmr/laws-regulations/regulations/index.html