I will be fishing the Berkely Pier in CA?

I don’t fish Berkeley Pier but I know halibut and have caught over a thousand smalls and over 100 legals off piers, the ones around piers are usually in shore halibut. Not very often do over twenty pounders get up into the surf but the pier halibut (in order of how long the bait lasts in the water) love smelt, small sardines, herring, grunion, small silver dollar perch, small spanish mackerel, mackerel and anchovies. use the small sabiki cut the wings shorter so they aren’t much longer than the hooks and use a 1 oz double tie on sinker on the bottom of it. use crushed bread and saltwater to make half golf ball sized spit wads to drop on the water from above and it will trail down into the water just like pelican droppings and the bait fish come running for it. drop the sabiki in the middle of the trailing crumbs. go to the bottom to look for herring and in no more than ten feet of water next to the pilings of the pier for small perch. the other bait fish will be out and about so you will have to cast underhand out to them. if there are what appears to be sea ducks swimming toward the pier pilings they are eating the mussels and disrupting all the organisms that attach to and live on the pilings and that is where I would start fishing for the halibut.(at that depth) but most of the nicer baits I have caught over the years has been nearer to the middle of the piers not so much out on the ends (unless they are a really short pier). the perch will catch halibut up in the surf (2 – 4 feet deep) better than out nearer the end and the herring better nearer the deeper end than in shallow. Smelt anywhere, sardine anywhere in the middle out to the end. Spanish mackerel in the middle third and even frozen anchovies cut at an angle and in half if nothing else works. If the waves are bigger than overhead (to surfers) and or the wind is blowing hard, you might as well find something else to do. They are most aggressive as the sun comes up, right after the clouds burn off and the sun forces them in the shade under the pier and right before the sun sinks into the pacific and after dark the pier oriented halibut will bite on the frozen anchovies better than live bait as well. I use a carolina rig 3/4 oz for every two feet of wave height (from the front). I use levelwinds, heavy action pitching sticks and 8 pound green trilene maybe 10 # on rod 2. I like a 22 inch leader of 16 pound fluorocarbon and I fish under the pier not away from it.