Exploration is a funny game.
The general gist of what your asking starts with as you say, money in the bank, that is allocated for drill programs that are dynamic in the sense that the money is allotted to either exploration drilling, infill drilling or step out drilling, with each of these requiring different types of rigs for different levels of geological confidence at different stages of the process and at different sites to the orebody.
With each core that you receive from each rig, you need to log it in a core box that is taken to a core shed, which they are building and will be complete soon on-site. This should speed things up dramatically, not that it is slow now. The level of detail KK puts into every ann is huge, and there are heaps of assays pending.. I literally cannot be bothered counting them all in the most recent NR's.
Again, they are working on different parts of the body at different times, with different lag areas. We just had a little bit of low-grade bulk in the west at Verde, now some high grade bonanza in the hills.. please refer to the elephant above so that you get the picture. We know it's a elephant but we need to prod a bit more. 150km of drilling should do it.
CEL has 50 people on-site in Argentina, no small number. 14 Exploration geologists, western trained. The core handlers and core cutters will log and document the rock before splitting them and keeping some and sending the rest of for fire assay (I am assuming it's fire assay given the met work).
CEL has 3 labs working for it, with turn around times from 30-60 days. Factors that affect this are $$, seasonal (to our benefit at the moment) and general drilling activity in the province.
People snub their nose at Argentina due to geopolitical/fiat risk but you also have the benefit of being able to draw up 9 rigs, hire heaps of people, send them up to areas with a donkey, build rigs where you want them and cut a lot of the red tape. This is by no means saying they are doing anything below board, merely that I think they can skip the manual handling "lift with your legs" 2 hour preso before getting on with the job in Argentina, and this is of benefit to us.
Personally I'm happy for them to drill out the program which is the next 8-9 months then raise heavily again and go round 2 with the rigs.. yeah yeah throw out a resource update somewhere along the way but KK is tracking it internally.. they know what they've got.. just a matter of making it attractive for a TO.
All IMO DYOR
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