a sullen and haughty management, page-4

finicky - I've called Philip Bruce's mobile a few times during the year and gotten straight through to him. I've found he's taken the time to answer the questions I've had and been fairly patient about the lack of understanding of mining terminology. I did leave a message on one occasion and he didn't return the call so maybe you have to just be lucky to get through to him.

One thing to remember is that the management themselves can't predict with certainty any of this stuff - it is a trial mining exercise and the plant was initially designed for trial processing.

They will find out more about the diluted mining grades of the ore and which areas are economical to mine and what quantities they will provide as they go along. Similarly with the plant improvements I'd imagine there's a fair bit of trial and error about the exercise.

In relation to their expected throughput - they have already given a guide as to where they are hoping to get the plant throughput up to in the recent AGM presentation. They are initially aiming to get it up to 1500 tonnes per month - which equates to roughly 75 tonnes per day, 5 days per week. Further down the track they are hoping to imrove that to 2500 tonnes per month which equates to about 125 tonnes per day, 5 days per week or 100 tonnes per day, 6 days per week.

In relation to how much revenue they will produce and whether it wil be enough to cover costs - I don't think anyone, including management, can possibly know this or answer this with any certainty at the current stage.

The only thing we can do is make some educated guesses and thats pretty much all they can do as well - though you'd hope their educated guesses are better than ours!

They've published their expected production throughput rates, they've published their current known resources and grades, and they've kept us up to date with the reconciled grades they've been achieving from mining and processing different areas, and they've stated that so far it looks like their grade and tonnage estimates are likely to be exceeded.

We join the dots as best we can and take a punt.

In my view thats the game of mining speculation. They're a junior minor working on a shoestring budget trying to scratch together a mine - we, as speculators, hope to be in the hot seat when it all comes together, by monitoring and piecing together as much as we can and making our own educated guesses.

For me the thing thats keeping me excited is the historical grades (that Opaline put up again recently). Every time I see those figures I can't help getting excited - basically at any point in time they could hit super high grade ore and solve any cashflow issues with one weeks worth of processing.

I tend to think they've kept us pretty well informed as to whats going on with the plant and with the mine development and exporation.

What would be good is to get some more up-to-date and accurate information on how the cost side of things are going - I'd agree that they've been a bit sloppy in this area - and its obviously very important to be keeping a tight eye on costs and cash outgoings in the current environment.

In particular I was suprised to see a figure of $4 million net cash shown in the AGM presentation (18th Nov) when the sept quarter cashflow showed $7.5m with predicted outflow of $3.5 million for this quarter. The cashflow statement doesn't include accounts payable so its possible there was money coming out from previous quarter, and 'net cash' may include current known accts payable as well (and may not include gold), but it would be good to get clarification on this side of things.