Anta Kori Update

I haven't been following Regulus to closely for the last 6 months, but I decided to compile the new drilling data (link and link) and see what they have been finding, and how the new drilling may impact the overall resources for the project.

Background blurb:

The original resource for Anta Kori was done waaaaay back in 2012 for South Legacy, but if you read through it, it is very light-weight, we don’t get any information on:

• Where the resources are located – not even a simple map
• Where are the open-pitable resource located?
• And the underground resource? Where is it, how will they mine it, from the bottom of the pit?
• No images or sections of the block model showing grade distribution etc.

It is a crap report, a quick and dirty resource calculation. I especially hated the way that they used every metal under the sun to calculate the CuEq grades for the various resource cut-offs.

In essence, it is a crap report.

However, table 14.7 did give a breakdown of the global resources (i.e. not constrained by property boundaries). I wanted to see if I could create a base model from the historic data that could match it, with the idea that I could bring in the recent drilling results and see what happens.

However, I have a big problem:


 
Look at this table in detail, start with the first row. Write out the total contain metals in full (i.e. including the “0” in the column headings. Do you get:

• 519,541,000 tonnes or ~520Mt that contain
• 4,429,000 lbs of copper – just 4.4Mlbs
• 126,335,000 oz of gold – 126 million ounces of gold 
• 3,989,155,000 oz of Silver – just under 4 billion ounces of silver
• 10,598,000 lbs of Moly
• 572,695,000 lbs of Lead
• 2,172,276,000 lbs of Zinc

Damn it, Southern Legacy found South America’s largest gold deposit and second largest silver deposit. Who gives a shit about copper with all that lovely gold and silver.

Unfortunately, as I’m an idiot, I decided to try and work out WTF was going on, brought the data into excel and calculated the amount of contained metal for each element (basically took the tonnage and multiplied it by the grade provided).

And you get….



There are some slight differences:

• ~30% reduction in contained copper (assuming the table was referring to Billions pounds of copper).
• ~45% increase in gold (I have assumed that they put the contained gold under the contained silver column)
• Silver, lead and zinc stay the same (assuming that the contained silver was put under the contained gold column)
• ~80% drop in contained Moly

Generally, very painful news, but the extra couple of million ounces of gold is a nice bonus.

The silly thing is, table 14.5 that splits the resource into Open Pit and underground areas, i.e. the one on Regulus’ website is fine.
 
WARNING: These guesstimate calculations are complete BS. They are based on grade only, and are designed to give a feel to what Regulus have added to the project.

This is a global guesstimate, I haven't split out mineralization by type, I have assumed everything is the same, which we know is wrong as the high-grade intercepts are restricted to narrow, sub-vertical breccia bodies and veins.

I've included a Leapfrog 3D viewer file here of the various iterations (link)

Notes:
I’ve used the CuEq values, but in the recent drilling these have been calculated from Cu+Au+Ag only, not everything including the kitchen sink as used in the 2012 technical report.
I haven’t factored in mining type, property ownership or recoveries. I’m treating it as a single deposit, calculating the global resources and then clipping it by property boundary to see how much is in Regulus’ concessions..

TAG Guesstimate Global Historic resources

So we get close, I have slightly less tonnes and a slightly smaller CuEq grade (0.48% vs 0.51% from the 2012 technical report).

When we compare the drilling we can see that Regulus have done a lot of work.

Before Regulus:
 

Regulus:

lots more copper intercepts

We see a lot more holes, drilled to much greater depths exploring for the Skarn mineralization that was of secondary interest to Southern Legacy who were mainly focusing on the near surface high-sulfidation gold dominant mineralization.

So, what impact does that have on the project ‘resources’?

 

Potentially a lot.

WARNING: I've assumed that all the mineralization is the same, I haven't separated by skarn vs HS vs breccia vs vein. It will be an over-estimate.

If we clip it by property boundary:



We see that the majority is on Regulus’ concessions. This is biased by the fact that they can’t report the intercepts that do not occur on their concessions. 
However, when we put the global resource figures on the USGS Porphyry Copper chart we see this:



*CuEq figure form the 2012 Technical report, but just using Cu, Au and Ag

If we look at the global resources, the average grade of Anta Kori wasn’t quite good enough. However, if we look at the high-grade (>0.5% CuEq) core of the system, we see that the project changes completely.




It now sits firmly in the ‘good’ area of the chart.

TL:DR version

Regulus have done a lot of work at Anta Kori that should lead to a decent jump up in resources. The key here is to look beyond the overall tonnage to see how much high-grade (>0.5% CuEq) material they have.

An important question to ask or at least think about is - How will Regulus report their upcoming resources? With the agreement with Coimolache allow them to report a global resource or will they only be able to report the mineralization that occurs on their concessions?
An Observation
On the plan map that accompanies the last PR we see hole AK30 sitting way out to the NW all on its own. Why did Regulus drill such an anti-social hole?





If we look a bit closer we see that the hole starts on Coimolache ground, suggesting that Regulus are still working with the Coimolache permits. This may mean that they still haven’t been granted their own permits to drill in that area.



It looks like the hole is testing the contact between the limestones and porphyry, but without a decent surface geology map to help, it is hard to know why they have been drilling ~500m to the NW of the known mineralization. It is a low risk hole, if it gets something, then they’ll have expanded the footprint significantly, but if it gets nothing, no-one will really care.

AntaKori Update

I've been (slowly) working on a series of posts reviewing several porphyry projects, highlighting that many are very small or just too low grade to really bother with, but I decided to go back and update my AntaKori model, with the recent-ish drilling results (link) because I've had this nagging feeling that AK was the same - not quiet good enough.

I plotted its resources on the USGS Cu chart of doom with updated CuEq figures using Regulus' CuEq calculation shown intheir PRs, which, unlike the 2012 43-101, doesn't include any credits for Mo, Pb or Zn. Doing this decreases the overall CuEq grade from 0.92% to 0.83% CuEq.



So, my gut-feeling was wrong, AK is good enough, but has there been any change with the new drilling?

Here is an officially bad calculation for the AK resources that occur within the Regulus mineral licenses. You can get the Leapfrog viewer file here (link).

~11Mt extra tonnes at the same grade

That's disappointing, but the grade has stayed the same! Small victories!

Why wasn't there a drastic change? The drill results have been impressive, but unfortunately, the drilling has been directed by Coimolache who are focusing on extending the high-sulfidation gold mineralization they are mining to the west, and had not been focused fully testing the skarn-porphyry potential at AK.

However, hole AK-18-007 may be changing that. Most companies won't drill a 1400m deep hole costing ~$0.4M if it wasn't hitting something interesting (unless they needed a lot of novelty knife sharpeners for the Lima Gold Symposium). Unfortunately, we'll never see the results, but we can do some arm waving.

Here is the hole plotted against Kev 'n' Stu's geology section...

A 1400m drill-hole drilling nothing, I don't think so.... 

Oooooooohhhhh, the 700m interval that Regulus have seen, fondled and probably licked, lines up quite well with that flushed Miocene Porphyry (same age as Antamina - 900Mt @ 0.99% Cu) intrusion thrusting powerfully through the hard rocks of northern Peru.

Why don't we have a look how this hole relates to the other targets defined by Regulus?



I've borrowed the Intense magnetic image from the latest presentation, not just because it is pretty, but looking beyond the hot color stretch we can see that hole AK-18-007 was drilled between the 2 bestest-ist porphyry-skarn targets (# 1 and #2) on the property? Regulus already have a decent sized target that is basically the sweaty armpit of a well mineralized district. I'm hoping that they can get some rigs exploring the blue nipple (target 1) to see what is causing it.

The red-stuff is just skarn and no-one cares about that.....

Lupaka - a blast from the past

Lupaka Reports 9.86 g/t Au-Eq. over 130 m from Underground Sampling Program at the Invicta Gold Project

fuck me, that sounds great (link), but it is bullshit. 

They aren't lying directly to you, they've just resurrected one of those old favorite sleights of hand (ECU Silver were famous for doing this) by trying to impress you by misrepresenting the size of their penes mineralization by using the strike length rather than width.

I guess 12m @ 18.1 g/t AuEq wasn't good enough.

Here is an annotated doodle from the map accompanying the PR

I do like the fact that much more sampling has come from the Footwall vein, there is a sample every 5m (give or take), but only every 20m on the hanging-wall vein. I wonder which is better?

Even better is the way that they generously decided to include some of the HW assays (e.g. samples CH_16, 19 and 20) into the FW zone so that they could 'improve' its grade.

So now it is my turn to do some bad math:



I split out the assays by sample location (FW, HW and Combined)

• FW vein
• average width = 4.6m
• average grade = 8.4 g/t AuEq
• HW evein
• average width = 5.8m
• average grade = 6.7 g/t AuEq
• 'Combined' veins
• average width = 8.4m
• average grade = 10.6 g/t AuEq

Not to shabby, but definitely not what was advertised on the tin. It also shows that the intersection zone between the FW and HW veins is an attractive exploration target to follow up and down dip as they could define a small, but high-grade ore-shoot. 

Regulus - Antakori update

Just a quick update, a couple of weeks ago some additional assays were released by Regulus from Antakori (link).

Summary

• Drilling restricted to the edge of the property
• Focus on HS-epithermal system by Coimolache - drilling to extend pit resources
• It is going to be interesting to see some drilling in 2018 designed by Regulus
• Arsenic restricted to the Intermediate Volcanics and the HS-epithermal mineralization.
• Minimal As in Skarn zone.
• Thick, but relatively low-grade Cu mineralization hit by hole 17-161 extends the limits of the Skarn mineralization by 400m to the SE, but the elevated Zn and decreasing Cu indicates that it was drilled near the edge of the system.

I've brought in the new data into 3D and run it through Corebox's Drill Hole Interval calculator, and built a 3D model, that you can download it from here (link - note: it is 63MB in size). I want to see how the Cu, As and As are related.

DISCLOSURE: I have used the assay information from Table 2 as it includes assays for Ag, Zn and As. Its intervals are slightly different to Table 1, from where the press release headline was is referencing, so there will be slight differences.

Geology

We can see that all the 2017 drill-holes have come from around the SW margin of Regulus' concessions. When we overlay this information onto a satellite image we can clearly see that the drilling by Coimolache is focused on drilling the extensions of the High-Sulfidation (HS) epithermal mineralization that they are currently mining.

Black = 2017 Drill-holes

Results are focused along the SW margin of the Antakori concessions, it looks like Coimolache are focusing on drilling the extensions of mineralization currently being mined.

Here are a series of sections from the latest results.

Section - L1050NW - Drill-hole AK-17-003 and 003A

Copper

We can see that the highest copper grades (>0.25%) appear to be found at the contact between the HS-epithermal (in the Light-green Upper Volcanics) and the skarn mineralization (in the Light Blue limestones), and are the discrete >0.25% Cu zones restricted to the narrow, intrusive dykes (pink and red units)?

Gold

It appears that all the gold mineralization is found in the upper HS-epithermal zone. Minimal gold appears to be found in the intrusive rocks).

Arsenic

Here we see As is restricted to the upper HS-epithermal zone with minimal As in the Skarn.

Section - L200NW - Drill-hole DHSF17-161 and AK_17_004 (results pending)

Copper

Again, Cu is restricted to the Skarn (limestones). It is generally low grade, around 0.1 to 0.25% Cu, but there are a couple of narrow, high-grade (>1%) zones that appear to be associated with either the old breccias or narrow Young Felsic units. In the NE, several short holes have intersected narrow Cu-Au mineralization associated with narrow, massive sulfide veins.

Gold

Minimal gold was intersected by hole 17-161, this hole didn't intersect HS-style mineralization within the AK concessions. It will be interesting to see how much HS-mineralization will be hit by hole  AK_17_004.

Arsenic

Again, minimal As is found within the skarn units.

So you can see that the Cu grades are gradually decreasing to the SE, and the elevated zinc assays seems to indicate that hole 17_161 was drilled into the peripheral part of the large Antakori skarn system, suggesting that the high-grade core is probably located to the NW.

Tinka Update

I'm going to do a different spin on the post, initially focusing on the results and then look at some areas that have been under-drilled to see where Tinka can go to add some tonnes to and/or improve the quality (category) of their resources.

Summary

• Some good infill holes (A17-085 and 096) in the core of the system
• System is getting weaker to the east (A17-093) and to the SE (A17-094).
• Narrow, albeit high-grade zones drilled to the east of the West Ayawilca resource (A17-083 and 085)
• A few holes were drilled in the Chaucha, Zone 3 and Valley targets, but to date, no significant mineralization was discovered. However, early days.... 

Results

We are now looking at a mature exploration project. Tinka are now drilling the periphery of the South Ayawilca system, so the mineralization is now narrow and deep.

Blue = Sept PR; Red = Oct 2nd PR; yellow = result pending

Here are some sections

Hole A17-087 - SW end of the South Ayawilca Deposit

We can see that mineralization is dying out to the SW.

A17-071 (left) SE extent of mineralization

Mineralization dying out to the NE, but there are a few gaps. Hole A15-041 (to the right) hit multiple zones of moderate zinc mineralization.

The effect that this drilling has had on my officially bad resources is:

Full breakdown of ZnEq resources

We actually see just a slight increase in tonnes, but a decrease in grade. This is due to the slightly lower average grade due to all of the different cut-off limits.

This may sound negative, but essentially Tinka have been drilling at South Ayawilca all year, and have defined a new, deposit at Ayawilca. It will be interesting to see when a new technical report is released.

Opportunities

However, I have a question: Where are Tinka going to drill now? The drilling to date seems to have closed off the South Ayawilca deposit, where are they going to generate future intercepts and grow the resource.

There are 3 areas where they can focus:

1. Infill drilling - designed to increase the confidence of the resource (increase the amount of M&I resources and reduce the amount of Inferred)
2. Expansion - drill around the edges and between known mineralized zones.
3. Green-fields - drilling of new targets

Each of these have a different risk vs reward levels, and I've spent a few days compiling as much of the drilling data as possible from technical reports and old press releases.

They have already started drilling some of the pother regional targets, but unfortunately, so far the results haven't been very positive, but we need to remember that they have only drilled 6-7 holes on them, so it is early days.

So, I will focus on the first two. Where are there: 

• Under-drilled areas
• Where some intercepts haven't been followed up on.

NOTE: there may be reasons certain areas haven't been explored (e.g. access issues, topography, hydrology etc.). I'm going to ignore these in this post as I'm not intimately familiar with the project.  

Unfortunately, I'm lazy. Fortunately, Leapfrog can all of the hard work for me. I drew a slice through the project, along the main zinc horizon.




I got leapfrog to create 50m and 100m (radii) buffers around each drill-hole.

Pink = under explored areas

I always do this as it shows me very quickly where there are un- and under-explored areas of a project, and as a simple geologist, I like to put holes in areas where they have a good change of getting high-grade zinc mineralization, like here:

Gaaaaaaapppp

That area is ripe for reaming. This is a perfect area for dumb exploration, simply whack a hole between 'em and you have an easy win! The area to the right of hole A12-008 could also do with a few holes as well, you'll get some decent grades for your PRs there.

However, this raises and interesting question for Tinka. Do they focus on drilling the known mineralization or start exploring the property for more deposits?

If they focus on drilling to improve the confidence in future resource calculations or keep looking for new deposits, and maybe even the BMF?

Ankakori - the first hole

DISCLOSURE: I should have bought more

What a whopper! A great first hole from Regulus at Antakori (link). They have been very intelligent and the initial drilling is focused at filling in the gaps left by [insert name here].

You can download the 3D model from here (link) - please not that this file is big, I've included the topography and overlain the property boundary and some geophysics in the 2006 technical report.

Summary

• Antakori is a complicated multi-phase mineral system. dominated by:
• High-sulfidation Epithermal - Au, Ag, Cu and As rich
• this is what is mined by the neighbors to the SW
• Skarn/porphyry mineralization - Cu +/- Zn, Ag, Pb rich
• Great first hole, plugged into a nice high grade zone identified back in 20XX
• Mineralization is Epithermal (high-sulfidation) - hole will be Enargite (Cu-Au and As) rich
• AK-17-001 didn't go deep enough to test the skarn/porphyry potential, but hole AK-17-002 will!

Hole AK-17-001, 002 and 003 have been drilled along the SW margin of the property, where it butts up against the Tantahuatay Mine.

my annotations - is that mag low to the north a porphyry?

 Hole AK-17-001 went smack between historic holes SDH-034 (120m @ 0.63 g/t Au and 0.67% Cu) and SDH-037 (188m @ 1.07 g/t Au and 2.02% Cu) drilled in 2012, and demonstrate that this zone appears to be quite high-grade and robust.

here is a cross section

pink = HS-epithermal domain; blue = skarn domain

You can see where hole AK-17-001 has hit, the copper grades are very good, but the gold is restricted to a narrow (23m core length or ~ 10m true width) zone grading ~ 7 g/t Au with a lower grade halo, suggesting that there could be some high-grade veins in the core of that hit.

And a long section with some distances on it.




Why don't we take a bit of time to look at the Antakori property. To steal a football pun, it is a project of 2 halves:

1. High-sulfidation Epithermal deposit
2. Skarn-porphyry deposit

HS-Epithermal Mineralization

This is what they are mining next door and looks like this:

Dickite, hehehe

The enargite is the issue here, it contains arsenic, and historically this project is regarded as having an arsenic issue. It does, but it is local, and it will be a problem for the neighbors if (when?) they start expanding the open pit into this area (with a nice NSR to Regulus is they do!).

The Skarn-porphyry mineralization

Simple formation model - Porphyry + limestone = skarn

Peru has a few big 'uns (Antamina, Las Bambas, Tintaya etc.) that produce a lot of metal. The historic drilling has hit some skarn, but it hasn't been drilled systematically, and this is where a lot of potential for AK is. I was a bit disappointed that hole AK-17-001 didn't go deep enough, but a minor grumble.

It looks like this:

doesn't look impressive, but can be big!

However, hole AK-17-002 should be going a lot deeper properly looking at the skarn potential at Antakori, and is the hole I'm interested in!

So, early days, but it is good to start the 2017 drilling with a nice hot hole. A bit of a cheat (focusing on infilling a known high-grade zone, but might as well test the lowest risk targets to get the juices going.
However, I have a few questions:

• How much input do Regulus have in this drilling campaign, are they restricted by their partners?
• Do they have permitting to explore the entirety of the project or are they restricted to specific areas?
• Why are they drilling that gold project in the US?

This is going to be an interesting, developing story, I'm happy with the first results and would like to see some evidence of regional exploration (cheap, low-end stuff), and maybe some geophysics to see if there are other decent targets in the area.

Tinka, Tailor, Soldier......Zinc!

Some new results from Tinka, so here is an update!

Summary:

• Hole A17-063 continued to give some excellent results. The lower zinc zone has been extended by >200m.
• However, drilling away from the core zone just hit narrow, albeit high-grade zones and veins
• Good potential to expand resources to the NW of holes 061 and 063 - Tinka are drilling holes 69, 70, 71 and 72 into this area and theses are holes to look out for as they could bring the size of the South Ayawilca deposit to >12Mt @ >7% Zn

I've also updated the Officially Bad (TM) resource table

A nice bump up in resources

I've also built up the Leapfrog Model (you can have a look at the 3D views - link), and included the faults from the plan map on the Tinka Website. I want to see how mineralization is related to the faults.

It sits nicely in the middle

We can see that the best mineralization is found between the 2 green faults. I've drawn a think black line to show what I think is the spine (i.e. the thickest part) of the mineralization.

It would be nice to see some holes to the SW (right) of hole A17-064

When we look at the section, we can see that hole A17-063 hit a high-grade, but relatively deep zinc zone, and the shallow zones hit by holes A17-056 and 061 don't continue to hole 063.

Why? Did they hit a vertical (chimney) zone of zinc mineralization, or is this upper zone hosted in a small, laterally discontinuous unit of favorable host rocks?

Left = horizontal mineralization; right = vertical chimney around hole A17-056

Tinka have been kind and included a map showing where the additional holes have been drilled, but the assay results haven't been released (it does take time to get the samples from the Andes down to Lima for analysis).

Tinka - Ayawilca

We have seen some decent hits from Tinka's Ayawilca project in Peru.

• 62.4m @ 5.6% Zn, inc. 17.9m @ 11.6% Zn (link)
• 51.9m @ 10.1% Zn, 62 g/t Ag (link)
• 18.6m @ 10.4% Zn and 52 g/t Ag (link)

Summary

• Drilling has hit multiple high-grade zinc (with Ag credits) lenses over a ~200m length
• officially bad tonnage guesstimate = 8Mt @ 4.7% Zn
• including a 2.3Mt core grading 7.2% Zn
• Early days, mineralization open to the north and south
• Faulting may have a significant impact on size of the deposit.

I've brought the data into Leapfrog Geo (you can get the 3D viewer file from here (link), back calculated the residual grades to see how everything looks.

Zinc

Multiple lenses

Silver

Silver is essentially in the same place as zinc

Lead

Lead is restricted to a few, narrow zones.

We see a number of zinc lenses, that appear to pinch-out to the NW and SE. What will be critical is what the faults (dashed black lines) do to the mineralization, are they:

• Pre-mineralization – minimal effect, but could have some high-grade Zn (+Ag) mineralization up them
• Post – offset the mineralization – i.e. the mineralization could be deeper or shallower

I was intrigued by the zonation (?) in different metals:

• Zinc appears to be relatively consistent, forming continuous >5% zones between the drill-holes, but there does appear to be higher grades in the Northwest.
• Silver - there are higher grade silver zones, several appear to be close to the northwest (left) fault, and there is a nice high-grade zone at depth.
• Lead - minimal lead, some high-ish grade intervals associated with the NW fault, but in general the Pb levels are very low.

It does appear that the NW fault could be an important controlling structure and may have some high-grade mineralization (a chimney) associated with it. It was a shame that hole A17-059 wasn't pushed on a bit further to test this fault at depth.

Hole 58 is interesting, does it show a continuation of this zinc zone to the NW or is it a separate zone or related zinc vein.chimney associated with the NW fault zone?

I did a quick and dirty 'resource' tallying

So that is a good start, so why don't we look at the upside

A Crap doodle - i'll be updating this

You can clearly see that the zinc zone is open to the NE and SW, and will offer good potential to define a good chunk of mineralization, as this zone is ~300m wide and so far drilling has focused (6 holes - 56A was an extension of 56, so i'm counting it as 1 hole), on a 100m section.

I'm also interesting to see what hole 59 will hit. I'm not very confident (maybe a couple of narrow zones) as mineralization is pinching out towards the NW fault, and my gut feel is that this fault is an important controlling structure, which either controlled the ore bearing fluids or has offset the mineralization.

Camino Minerals - initial review

Camino have released some interesting results from the Los Chapitos project in southern Peru (link and link)

Summary

• Good
• Great result from hole CHR-002
• but, we have grade smearing, outside the >2% zone, it drops off to 0.84% Cu, still good, but could be marginal for an open pit operation
• Small, near surface oxide zone
• Some other interesting targets to be tested around the property
• Bad
• It was a shame that they went with cheapo RC drilling option as it meant:
• Hole 002 terminated in good copper mineralization
• Holes 004 and 005 couldn't reach the extension of this zone.
• Typical grade 'expansion' - the high grade (>1% Cu) is found in narrow zones surrounded by low grade (0.2-0.3% Cu).
• Trench samples look good, but I'm skeptical of trench sampling as:
• remember - you can bias them by sampling along a mineralized structure rather than sampling across it - the FAG will explain how you can 'improve' your trench results

Is water, or the lack of, going to be an issue?

They are drilling using an reverse circulation rig, so as they mention in the March 29th PR (link), so they will be drilling 200-300m/day and they will finish the program about now....

There are advantages and disadvantages with using an RC rig:

• Advantages
• Quicker - drill 200-300m per day compared to 50-100m for a diamond drill
• A lot cheaper - ~50% of the cost (or even cheaper) of a diamond rig.
• Doesn't need water - very useful in the Atacama desert
• Disadvantages
• Lower quality geological information
• greater deviation - the holes drilled by Camino started at 45 or 50 degress, but steepened to almost 80 degrees at the end of the hole.
• if you see any company not-surveying RC holes, that is a good sign that they don't know what they are doing and that the data from these holes are suspect as they can't accurately tell you where the mineralization is located.
• bigger visual impact
• require more site preparation - wider roads, larger pads
• generally limited depth - ~300m depth is generally the deepest you can drill with RC
• can have grade issues - smearing of grade, especially at the water table

However, for exploration, you have to balance cost, speed against geological information. We can see its limitations, CHR-002 stopped in >1% Cu mineralization, and with a diamond rig you could push the hole on (if you have enough rods) and see exactly how wide that zone is.

TL:DR: They started off good, but by using the wrong equipment, they have are not maximising the value they are getting from teh drilling (unless drilling magnetite-rich zones is the objective).

Geology Wank

Hole CHR-002, very good zone, but as the hole stoped in mineralization we don't know how wide it will be.

Follow-up holes 003, 004 and 005 intersected the upper copper oxide zone, but due to hole deviation, which is common in RC drilling, they all steepened and didn't reach the target. The irony is, this deviation was seen in holes 001 and 002 and I would have expected Camino to have modified the program accordingly, as they showed us that there was a very high probability that holes 004 and 005 would have steepened (go more vertical) and not hit the copper zone.

I'll explain it visually, I prepared this image form the original press release

• Red line = planned hole trace (i.e. where they wanted the hole to go)
• Colored line = actual trace of the drill-holes
• Difference between these lines = the deviation
• we can see that as the hole gets deeper, the hole steepens (becomes more vertical)
• We can also see that the holes can only be drilled to around 300m - this is as far as this RC rig is able to drill at this project.
• Magenta line = what I think hole CMR-005 will do - it will hit the upper zone (my guess ~20m @ 0.6% Cu) and not reach the copper zone.

This is from the latest presentation

bendy drillholes

Look how much blue (0.1-0.3% Cu) is included in that 44m zone grading 0.86% Cu!

so that makes them 0 from 3

So you can see how much the holes are bending by (up to 20 degrees), and that makes it hard for the company to hit the planned targets, which is the reason why holes 004 and 005 missed.

You also need to think about the how the mineralization occurs, is it:

• flat lying bodies
• Steeply dipping narrow zones
• large stocks

When we look at the presentation they show us some photos of some old workings.



They look to be nearly vertical, indicating that this how the mineralization occurs at Adriana.If the deep mineralization hit in hole 002 is vertical, then that zone may only by ~ 40m thick.



I think That Camino need to rethink their drilling strategy! They need to get some diamond rigs up there to answer questions on controls and size of mineralization. Continuing to drill RC-holes will start to reduce the value the company obtained from hole 002.

I've created a quick model of the drill-holes with their sections, so you can see how all the holes relate (link).

Look at how the Magnetite rich zone changes between sections...

Trenching results

Hello, FAG here.  Camino have given us some nice photos of some green-stained rocks in the Atacama.

Clouds!!!

Azurite skies...

and some photos of some old workings

Mein Mine

I've annotated the mine photo to show how you can get Maximum Impact (tm) results from trenches.

We have 2 trenches

• Trench 1 - running parallel/along with the copper zone
• Trench 2 - running perpendicular to the copper zone

Which will give the 'best result' for your press release?

• Trench 1 = 30m @ ~1% Cu
• Trench 2 = 3-5m @ 0.6-1% Cu

The question you need to ask is:

Mineralization

This was covered in the IKN post, so I've just included a image of a simplified mineralization zoning in a copper deposit

So, the upper zone is primarily oxide material, it may have some native copper and copper wad that is insoluble accounting for the 25% of the material that isn't acid soluble.

However, the lower zone is high-grade, contains only 25% soluble material, I wonder if this hole hit the enriched zone and we have a lot of Chalcocite.