Another factor would be, if the money bag was tied to Cooper and it was otherwise being pulled under, the air/water transfer would probably happen faster than if the bag was alone and allowed to float on top for a while.

I would think that drug smugglers at sea would wrap their goods in low/zero porosity plastic to avoid sea water contamination, and their bags would float considerably longer than a cotton one.

Just for fun, here are the data points I sent to my friend:

Height of bank bag = 75cm
Width of bank bag =  50cm
Length of bank bag = 50 cm
Weight of bag of $200,000 in twenties = 10.35 kg

I've attached my friend's calculations below. Again, based on these data points, the bag would float.

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Dredging material removed at these coords ...  answering several inquiries:

The dredge material deposited at the site where the money was located came from the north ‘half of the ship channel, which is 300 feet wide, between river mile marker 96 plus 38 feet and river mile marker 97 plus 17 feet. This material was deposited at two locations on the beach of the FAZIO Brothers’ Farm between August 19 through the 25th, 1974, ‘and consisted of 91,100 cubic yards of fill, and at one other location across the river on the Oregon side.

91,100 cubic yard of fill.

So what happend to all that fill?

Assume the fill was spread evenly at 3ft deep (1 yard)

that's 91,100 sq yards covered.
assuming a width of 50 yards, that's 1822 yards long (a rectangle)

that's more than 1 mile!

even if you say the width was 100 yards, that's about half a mile.

I think they had a sand operation going right? So not all of the dredging spoil was spread out locally...?? some was sold?

we talked about the piles of sand at their sand company before.

That's more dredge material than would fit on Tena Bar if my math is right. How would that work? That would be like trying to fit 10 pounds of shit in a 5 pound bag.

See that's why all this fine-grained analysis of dredge spoils just doesn't work. There were too many things in flight to analyze all that happened, and where.

When we have limited info, you can analyze the info to death, but that doesn't mean the available info is all that happened.

just saw an interesting collection of info from flyjack in 2020 on these details of where sand went
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Fazio started their Fazio Brothers Sand Company at some point. I had thought it was '70s but now not sure. Web seems to talk about it being a 25 year old company so that aligns with them getting their dredging permit in '95 or so. (I referred to pictures from their dredging permit application which shows the dredge pipe going to a similar place to where the bumps where on the old maps..near where the current large sand piles were in google earth)

So I guess it's a valid question: what happened to all the 1974 sand on the Fazio side. Was it just dumped? or was some sold like it was on the OR side (the ranch)

how much got moved off site vs stayed? Dunno.
You saw my post on the lady's ranch across the river that sold sand. She got sand during the same dredging operation, just on the other side of the river.


EDIT: in FLYJACK's post I think he references the Fazio sand and gravel operation being active in 1975, but I didn't read close enough, maybe. I forget these details.

While we know from Tom's research that a packet of money won't float for very long, has anyone confirmed with the bank bag filled with money and tightly secured would float?

I know that there are a lot of "unknowables" such as the configuration of the money inside the bag, etc., but in general, would a canvas bank bag fill with $20 bills like the one Cooper received, float in fresh water?