I can second Smalma on the fight of a dolly, even on somewhat inapropriately-sized gear.

Some year ago I was fishing the Dungeness during a particularly cold snap in late December with my old glass steelhead rod and direct drive reel - water was way low and clear below the hatchery, where a bunch of old boot coho were hanging out. I pitched a cluster of eggs into the hole anyway and was rewarded by a 14 pound keg of dynamite wild steelhead hen that tore up the hole, spent most of the time in the air, and in general ran me ragged until I finally wore her out and released her. I fished on downstream, found and lost another steelhead, and eventually made my way back up to that hole and threw a couple more baits into it. Nothing happened, so I crawled out on a log to look into the hole a little better and saw a nice fish, a little smaller than the one I released, laying right where I had been casting. As I sat there wondering why this particular fish was so zipper lipped it charged the school of coho, smacked onto a ripe old hen hard enough to make her discharge eggs, circled around and ate them. I got a good look at the fish and could see it was a dolly nearly 2 and a half feet long! Well, I had my answer, single eggs, so I rummaged around in my tackle, found an old dry fly on a #12 hook, stripped it bare and tied it on, dug around in my bait box for some nice big single eggs, stuck one on and waited. Sure enough, the dolly charged the coho again, I took advantage of the disturbance and strip-cast the egg into the pool with no weight, around it came after the eggs and sucked mine in. Well, I set the hook and this time I had a nuclear warhead - this puppy not only jumped around more than that big steelhead, it blew the hole to boot and took me twice as long to land. I finally measured and released it - it was "only" an 8 pounder - biggest dolly I ever caught though, and pound for pound likely one of the strongest fish I ever hooked.

Damn right release 'em, and let 'em grow up to be like that one