You are correct.
You can see here there is not a whole lot of gold at the top of the hole, about the first 150m:
This is not ideal, obviously, but it doesn't concern me too much. Generally, this is the opposite trend we see in all the other holes. You can see right next to it that there is some pretty high grade material up shallow in the adjacent holes.
Again, this announcement is really about the deeper part of the hole, which in turn is really about the S-E extension. They were targeting the area to the SE of Korbel with this hole, and this announcement is trying to communicated about that area, not the area where this hole was actually collared (the location of the pad). This is why it is angled so severely (looks like at least 45 degrees). The reason they drilled it like this is so they could drill off the same pad that was created for the other holes. The earthworks to create a pad often costs as much or even MORE than drilling the hole itself., especiallhy in the remote and rough terreane that we are dealing with there in Alaska. Drilling multiple holes off the same pad saves them having to built more pads and roads to those new pads.
I believe/hope that when they drill the holes from Pad 6 targeting this higher grade SE extension, we will see the higher grades near the surface as well, just as we have in the main part of what used to be called Block A and Block B of Korbel.
As for the possible deception here.... yes. No doubt there is some 'artistic' discretion used in choosing the intervals to report. This is mentioned in the snip from the JORC table in my previous post, so they aren't really trying to hind this from the astute investor/reader. This is not an uncommon practice though, and its is good there are people like you pointing it out. NVA in particular has been doing this kind of thing for a long time, I and a few others regularly point it out and have a quick moan. EG, one thing that still bothers me is their use of rounding to a single significant figure despite the very small numbers we are dealing with.
Of course, everything they are doing and reporting is 100% JORC code compliant. All juniors do stuff like this and really, its not that big of a deal.
(20min delay)