Never Never Deeps

One of the things you learn swinging an 11 inch coil across vast WA spaces is that most ground has no gold. Drilling down 1000 metres at $200 a metre or whatever it costs to hit a possible target maybe 20 metres wide, it seems to me, involves a fair bit of luck and a willingness to spend a lot of money on dry holes before finding where NN and its cousins came up from the mantle, assuming there is no fault or intrusion or fold or something which disappears the stem of the broccoli to who knows where. Or the whole thing is 200 metres away from where you drilled when the budget ran out. Five years down the track the mine reaches that point and finds the answer. Or doesn't.

Usually what happens is a deposit gets to a point where there is no way it is going to be left in the ground, mining starts, and as mining gets deeper mining life extends as it is revealed where the deposit actually goes.

It seems to me there is risk for shareholders in going for the "drill it down to the mantle" strategy because it gets more and more uncertain and more and more expensive the deeper you go, all the while funded by dilution. I think the current SP equates to about .45 undiluted by the last raise, so not a negligible consideration.

I won't complain if the drill shows the deposits link up, but if they do it won't be a huge high grade mass as appeared here in the fan fiction but more likely something much narrower and easy to miss.

When I see those deposit maps with colouring in I remind myself how few holes there are down the bottom areas ... that colouring is speculative, not JORC. I bet they had a heart attacking waiting to see if they could find gold on the other side of the discontinuity. Open at depth is a thing because there is such a thing as closed at depth.

It would be good to have a detailed exploration geologist's take on the deeper exploration.

I am not really complaining .. I am on board with the 7% in exchange for some deeper drilling, but I expect there could be a lot of holes with no result and it might not be possible to find the NN deeps.

Plan A should be to run the mill and make money ... I get the impression that is really plan B atm.

I would like to stop the pretence that maybe there won't be a decision to mine. If this deposit is going to be left in the ground and mill left turning empty to keep it lubricated then what on earth would count as a viable mine? Instead of vaguely talking about financial considerations which are knowable now how about some more convincing discussion about how the mill could be restarted?

RED 5 and SPR are cheese and chalk when it comes to presentations, but what I like about RED is they are focussed on running a really good mining operation.