Sokoman - thar be gold en those swamps

Sokoman have been releasing some interesting results from their Moosehead project (link and link) , the first set released in July managed to catch some money from Eric Sprott (link), but the good news is, he's still in the money.

However, whne you look at the data, you will notice:

1. There has been a crap load (~113 holes) of drilling on this project
• 7 holes by Teck in 1999
• 91 holes by Agnico from 2001 to 2004
• At least 15 holes by Sokoman
2. Virtually all of Sokoman's holes are exploring the West Trend, the area that didn't give us the thick high-grade intercept that send the share price soaring.

lots and lots of drilling, not all of it new..

So 12 of the 13 holes on this map (holes 14 and 15 aren't shown on the map accompanying the PR  for some reason), are exploring the very well drilled West Trend, and just one, little, lonely hole, MH-18-01 has been drilled to explore the East Trend.

I've tried to compile as much information as possible into Leapfrog Geo, and here is my pathetic attempt here (link). Please note that it is quite low quality, I had to guess the dip of the drill-holes (I assumed -60 for historic holes and -45 for the 2018 DH, unless there was evidence on plan maps and sections) and their hole lengths. So it is inaccurate, but gives a general feel.

So, by far, hole MH-18-01 has easily been best hole drilled this year, and one of the best intercepts on the project, but why haven't there been more holes drilled around it? If the hole naming convention is logical, it was the first hole drill on the property, hit a high-grade structure and since then, Sokoman haven't drilled a single hole around it to see what it is doing. Instead, they drilling lots of holes into an area that has received considerable drilling before. Why?

1. All of the historic core as been lost and they are doing confirmation drilling?
2. Don't want to ruin a good story with the truth machine? 

I'm going to give the the benefit of the doubt, in none of the presentations (including several from Altius) do they show any pictures of old core, so we have to assume that it doesn't exist.

I've tried to compile as much data as I can from the various presentations. We can see that the West Trend is very well drilled (even before the recent drilling) and most of the although high-grade and generally very narrow, and furthermore, most of the high-grade intercepts have had a plethora of holes drilled around them to see what the mineralization is doing. As we haven't been given any assays form these holes, I'm going to assume that they didn't hit anything good (i.e. >1 g/t Au).

Here is hole  MH-18-01, a wide bonanza zone, here is a photo:

(Hard)core porn

And an annotated version:



Oh no, virtually all of the gold is restricted to that quartzy-veiny bit (the white stuff) in the middle, with the surrounding boring grey rock rock with just a smidge of gold. So a big round of applause to Sokoman for that lovely example of grade smearing, however they could have done:

• 385.85m grading 1.35 g/t Au

I know the hole only went to 250m, but you can't BS-stats.

Why don’t we look at the other intercepts? Please note, I don’t have any info for the pre-2018 drilling, so the section shows approximately where the holes were drilled, but no results.

Section 1: Holes MH-18-02, 03, 12 and 09 (looking East – North to the left)



We see narrow high-grade mineralization, with a minor >1 g/t Au halo. It was a shame that hole 09 was lost before reaching target depth as these holes appear to have defined a gold zone over for 60m down dip. Nothing out of this world, but does show a narrow gold bearing structure with local high-grade mineralization.

Section 02: Holes MH-08, 10 and 13



Similar story, narrow high-grade with a minor ~1 g/t Au halo.

Section 03: Historical drilling


Some very high-grade hits (>400 g/t Au), but again very narrow, and it look like (even though I don’t have the data), that the follow-up holes were not able to find the continuation of mineralization. For me, the data is telling us that at Moosehead, the gold is restricted to narrow, 0.1-1.5m wide quartz veins with a minor Au halo. Unless the ‘new discover’ zone is very different, the mineralization looks too narrow and inconsistent to suggest that there is a large, high-grade deposit to be found at Moosehead.

The fact that >100 holes have been drilled on the project without defining any resources or discovering any zones of consistent mineralization indicates that they probably don’t exist.  My gut feel is that the mineralization in the East and West zones consist of narrow high-grade intervals that will be smeared out in the PRs to make them look wider and better than what they really are.
For Sokoman to make a go of it, they need to drill some more holes in the East Zone to follow-up on hole MH-18-01 and start drilling some of the other structures/anomalies so that they can keep the market happy with new discoveries.

Pretium - at last....

Brucejack's Q2 production figures were released today (link), and from the nearly >C$2.50 share price increase over the last month (including 13% today) you can tell that the market was happy, as  for the first time, the mine has expectations!

At last the head grade is approaching the reserve grade!

Let us break down the figures.

Au production

Blue = actual; red = planned (PEA); Green - difference

They were slightly under (3,300 ounces) from the Planned production figure outlined in the PEA, but a 3% difference isn't a huge amount for a nuggety gold deposit.

Au Head-grades

A huge change

Slightly under (14.9 vs 15.4), but a huge turnaround from the previous quarter.

Recovery

Still great!

Mill Throughput - quarterly

Slight dip, probably due to a planned shutdown for maintenance (probably 3 days in total).

Mill throughput - daily

We can see a dip in Q2, the mill was operating ~100 tonnes below capacity (2604 tpd vs 2700 tpd).


Now the hard part - they have to maintain it, as they can't use the 'ramping-up' excuse anymore if they don't meet their projected production figures.

Evrim - Cuale - a quick comment

Evrim have released some stunning assays from some trenching done at Cuale (link and link), and their share price has gone crazy.

However, there may be a bit of a hangover, especially when you look at the detailed assay results  (link), where you can see that in Trench 4, you can see that they have sampled  2 very high-grade structures surrounded by a wide zone of >1 g/t Au mineralization.

red = good

If you take out these 4 high-grade intervals, this is what happens:

A bit less than 13.61 g/t Au

Still very good, but you quickly see that 83% of the Au if in just 5.8m or 5.4% of the trench.
The rest of the country rock is running >1g/t Au, so it is still a great result, but not a spectacular one.

The good news is, Evrim have identified a nice high-grade structure for drilling!!!