Vizsla

Vizsla Resources share prices have been rocketing up recently on the back of some very juicy drill results (link and link) from their Copala project in Sinaloa, but is there more to the story than just a few hot holes or have they managed to consolidate a world-class mining district?

TL:DR version - No

What really interests me is that Vizsla keep telling us this:

Never been systematically explored? We have these maps in Vizsla's own PRs and presentations:

We have 2 areas with historic resources and a long section of the Animas vein with >100 holes on it. Maybe the drilling was done by the mine operator? Fortunately, Vizsla give us a helping hand and tell us at the bottom of the Panuco project page (just before the photos).

So, I went over to Sedar and downloaded the report. A full 100 pages of geological fun, which gently summarized the historic, non-systemaic work done by Silverstone, who only managed to drill:

Thta's only 21,641m in 200 holes. I'm guessing that Vizsla forgot about these holes. My guess is that the core doesn't exist anymore, or that looking at the long section above a chunk of the Clemes/Muerto zone was mined, and if we have a look at them, we see:

That they are a bit shite! Silverstone only managed to drill >21km of drilling in 2 holes and defined a small, low grade resource. Why?

We have 2 options:

1. Silverstone were crap, and managed to drill all the shite areas again and again
2. The mineralization at Copala is hosted in very small high-grade ore-shoots

Let us not question the competence of Silverstone, and focus on the second point - small, inconsistent zone of mineralization. We can look for this in a number of ways:

Directly

• High-grade mineralization restricted to 1 or 2 holes surrounded by lots of nothing
• high-grade intervals not joining up - the vein's the same, but suddenly the silver and gold have gone on holiday to a narrow foot-wall or hanging-wall vein

Here is a long section from the Honduras vein at Copala

Look at the scale - holes AM-20-08 is only 50m from holes 09, 10, and 11. We go from good to nothing in 50m. 

We see the same at the Napoleon discovery

There are some good drill-holes here, and the drilling here is at its early stage, but we can see that the high-grade intercepts are jumping from structure. We can also see that the "F" and "G" veins don;t appear to be very continuous, as they aren't intersected by hole NP-20-07 just 20m away.

Indirectly

• "Missing" intervals - we see on a map or section "waiting assay results", but the results never arrive
• "Missing holes" - were have the results for holes 01, 02, 05, 09 - WFT happened to holes 03, 04 and 06 --> they hot feck all is what happened.

Missing holes can also be expanded into an entire drill program going AWOL - this means all the holes were crap, and the company doesn't want to hurt everyone's feelings.

So, going through the technical report (you can download it from here), there is a table of all the narrow, high-grade hits (table 13.1)

This is just the first few intervals, there are 3 more pages for you to look at, but they look very similar to what Vizsla are getting and this is what they got:

This is crap for an underground mine, 370Kt @ 370 g/t AgEq, you can't do much with that.I hope Vizsla do find some massive ore-bodies, but the data presented by Silverstone and what we're seeing in the initial 2020 drilling data is that the high-grade mineralization is found is discrete, small ore-shoots.

One final comment, we're told this on the website:

How much are the mines producing? How big is the mill? Surely Vizsla will have some historic production figures to support the $23M purchase price?

BTW - Vizsla - Fresnillo don't own the Zacatecas district. Pan American and Capstone have a good chunk and ~50% was just sold by Santacruz silver to Zacatecas Silver earlier this year. You may want to correct that.