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.

Southern Silver - the bermuda triangle strikes again

There seems to be a common theme among Mexican exploration companies to start drilling and then to 'forget' the results.

Defiance have been excellent, Minaurum are jealously copying their example, and now Southern Silver have decided to join the cool gang and invoking the spirit of Donald Judd, and presenting results with the goal to rid them of the promotionalist's reliance on the referential results from drilling and presenting news in pieces that are free from emotion.

Either that, or the results have been shite..

With Southern Silver

• May 14th (link) - crews mobilized to drill Pene el Diminuto - Hazaah
•  July 19th (link) - second rig on site to drill the epithermal targets at CLM west.

 I'm not concerned by the CLM west drilling, it is testing a conceptual idea, the drilling at CLM was meant to hit mineralization along strike from the current resource and hit it close to surface, but you would have expected them to have hit something in the last 3 months....

The tequila curse strikes again....

Advance Gold - some drill results!!!

Drill results are like buses, you wait for ages, then 2 come along.....(link and link)

I was getting scared, maybe Mexico has become the Bermuda triangle of drill-results, with gangs of chihuahuas running around eating them up...

However, I want to direct this post to ABL and Julio Pinto Linares, PGeol. Wow, what a load of howlers you've made, let's go through them:

• You couldn't quite manage to add up the sample thicknesses from hole AGT-01
• Original - 3m @ 9.4 g/t Au
• Updated - 1.7m @ 9.46 g/t Au (link)
•  You didn't manage to send all of the vein for assaying (link)

 

• If you are going to release all the assays from you drill program, a good pro-tip is - try to include the over-limit assay results, unless you want to maintain the audience's suspense (is it 101 g/t Ag or 10000000000000000001 g/t Ag?!?!?!?!?!)

but the good news is, you're using a certified, internationally recognized assay lab, I tip my hat to you...

Hey, what's multiple cock-ups between friends....

Fortunately, the great man himself, on CEO.ca gave us this gem...

 

Grade isn't important in the oxide zone for these veins? So those old-timers were just moving rusty rock around Central Mexico for fun? Well, it kept them out of the bean fields....

Garibaldi - Nickel Mountain, the quest to find Voisey's Bay 2

Now that the black flies, mosquitoes and other nasty biting monsters of the Canadian Arctic have defrosted, some disturbed by the drilling that has been going on for the last 7 weeks at Nickel mountain (link),  but apart from that, we haven't heard anything else.

This would represent a subtle change from last year, when they were rushing out press releases, some just a week after drilling commenced (link and link) telling us about the massive, massive sulfide hits. Why no promo PR's now? 

You told us back at the start of June that drilling had commenced with 2 rigs, and by now, assuming they haven't broken down, you should have drilled 3000-3500m* by now.

(*my assumption is based on the drilling rates for drill-hole EL-17-01, where the hole was drilled to a depth of 332m over 8 days (24 Aug 2017 to 1st Sept 217)).

So no news on massive intercepts, I mean, the initial holes were going to focus on defining the Discovery zone and "systematically step out from EL-17-14, testing for nickel-copper-rich magmatic sulphide mineralization to the south where promising conductive targets have been defined by geophysical surveys".

I'm guessing it must have been the timing of the financing......

AntaKori update

A quick Anta Kori update from the latest round of drilling (link) from a couple of weeks ago. The results were good, with holes AK10 and 13 hitting thick zones of copper and gold mineralization.

Holes 11 and 12 were relatively poor, but if we look at the drilling in a bit more detail, we can see that there is a geological reason for this.

Let us go through each hole.

AK10

This hits lots of mineralization, all nicely skarn mineralization and appear to be sitting above/over an interpreted porphyry. It is strange that historic holes SDH-033 didn't hit anything, but where it entered the limestone we can see that it appears to have intersected some post mineral intrusive and southern legacy were focusing on the high-sulfidation mineralization.

AK-11

This hole was a bit crap, but really it was unlucky, it managed to drill a load of young, post mineral (?) volcanics that have stoped out (removed) the skarn and HS mineralization The narrow intervals could be fragments of skarn (xenoliths) in the volcanics.

AK-12

On the surface, another poor hole, but it didn't intersect the limestone that hosted the great zone intersected by hole AK-18-009 and terminated in the upper volcanics hosting the high-sulfidation mineralization. But if you look at this section, we have holes AK14 and 17 and these should get some juicy hits

AK-13

Almost the twin of hole AK10. Best grades were in the HS zone near surface, and in the underlying limestone the hole hit a well mineralized (>0.5% CuEq) skarn zone.


You can get the LF viewer file from here (link)


On the plan map and sections we have are shown the location, direction and inclination for some more holes, here are my predictions:

• AK14 - this is a steeper hole drilled from the same platform as hole 12. I'm guessing that it will hit ~300m @ >1% CuEq starting from ~240m depth.
• AK15 - drilled 100m east from hole AK10. My guess is that it'll get 160m @ >1.0% Cu Eq from 150m depth (Skarn mineralization), before drilling into the underlying fine grained sediemnts which will contain ~0.5% CuEq from 320-400m depth.
• AK16 - almost vertical hole being drilled from the same collar as AK13. I'm guessing that it will return similar grades to hole AK2 (330m @ 0.66% CuEq)
• AK17 - also drilled from the AK12 pad, it should hit a nice interval of >1% CuEq from 150 to 520m
• AK18 - Hole drilled way out to the east exploring the near-surface high-grade (HS) hits in holes SRC-007, SDH-044. This hole could be an interesting one to watch, as if they find decent skarn mineralization over east, then there is potential for decent resource expansion.
• AK19 - main target appears to be the near-surface HS mineralization. The majority of this hole appears not to be on the Regulus concession
• AK20 - HS exploration hole to the north of the deposit, exploring the high-grade HS mineralization intersected in holes SDH-005 and 010. It appears that the majority of the hole will be outside the Regulus concessions.

So, it should be an interesting couple of months..

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.

Altar - It's all about that As

Altar project, has a problem...

Come on babe, I'm about to put it down
And all that As
Go ahead and lock the door, you're about to work it out
And all that As
Won't you lead me to your whoopee spot?
Oh it don't make no sense all of that As you got
'Cause I done called it too that you see booty flu
With all that As

Oh baby all that As

Whip your hair in those stiletto heels
And all that As
I'm about to dress you up in hundred dollar bills
And all that As
Driving me crazy baby don't you pump the brakes
You better call the cops, I'm about to steal the cakes
On all the evidence they got my fingerprints
On all that As

Oh baby all that As

Or visually,

Source: 2013 technical report - Stillwater mining

This shows that there is an ~inverse ratio between As and Cu. So, high-As in the low grade (<0.4% Cu) and lowish As in the high-grade (.0.5%) core. However, we still see that concentrates produced by Altar will probably contain at least 1% As.

Why is this a problem? Penalties - here is a nice article for a few years back from International Mining (link). Highlights:

• China Imposes a limit of 0.5% As on imported base metal concentrates
• Few smelters will treat >1% As and will charge a penalty to do so (link)

It's all about that As