I'll give you some advice on how to find spots in D16 though, but I'll tell you that the less-pressured public land spots are hard to find and either difficult or tricky to access.
Two different things will make a spot better than average:
1. A water source that is more than a mile from any road with not much other water around. They should be out of the pines and down in the oaks or scrub. These are super tough to find on public land. You won't be hunting the water - they drink at night. You'll be glassing the area from a mile away to see where they travel and/or bed in order to ambush them the next day or stalk them.
2. Tiny public land parcels that have difficult access in some way, shape, or form, that allow you to hunt public land that's surrounded by private. The best hunting in San Diego, is 135 yards from private property.
If it's easy to get to, than everyone's going to go there and there will be few deer and they'll be nocturnal.
If you want to bowhunt, the combination of a D16 or AO tag along with an A22 tag will allow you to hunt from September all the way to Dec 31. The rut is basically 1 week earlier than midwestern whitetail (in the west. The far east desert, the rut is in January) and there's often a 2nd rut for the unbred does around xmas, which is a great time to hunt.
One more thing, with your AO tag (Archery Only), you can hunt all the surrounding units during their seasons, which will give you more options during October and you can go to NorCal and hunt in July/August and hunt the A and B zones if you want.
