One tries! But all we are really trying to do here is guess how long it will take the mud-rotary drill bit to 1. drill down to basement, 2. pull out and change over to a diamond drill bit with core barrel, and 3. to pull up the first run of drill core up from the target zone, to see if it's chock full of vein quartz, pyrite, brassy-yellow chalcopyrite, black chalcocite, peacock blue and purple-lustered bornite or even native copper (as at Winu). And we have very little technical information. We are just keeping ourselves amused whilst we wait. Could take another day or two. Could take another week. Drilling's never easy.
Meanwhile out there in the real world, up at Tetris, three or four sweating, shouting, swearing young blokes with dirty hair and tatts are toiling away in their hard hats, steel cap boots, earplugs, fly nets, dust masks and orange flouro, in the noise and the 42 degree heat whilst the mud rotary bit slowly grinds its way down through 520 metres of shitty ground and unforseen difficulties, hoping to eventually reach the basement. Or for the hole to eventually be abandoned short of it and have to be started all over again. It's probably going to be a challenging hole, having no information on ground conditions for 15 km in any direction. So it could take a day or two to get there, or it could take another week. We just have to be patient.
And all we really have to go on are a couple of red blobs on a PDF image. Which doesn't really tell us very much at all. The stuff of stock exchange releases!
But I am reasonably confident that the Tetris red blob couyld represent Havieron type mineralisation, because Antipa's geologist Managing Director is reasonably confident, and has said so publicly. And he and Antipa have a great deal more information than us to go on. They put the two little red blobs of colour on the map. They have all digital the magnetic data over Tetris,magnetic profiles from each of the survey lines, all the differentially processed depth images, and I think also some higher high-resolution ground magnetic data. They also have the gravity data. And having had Newcrest as partners in the ground up until recently, their geophysicists have probably also had access to the equivalent data sets for Havieron, validated by the drilling data there and downhole / drill core geophysical data. They know what Havieron looks like geophysicaly. They know what Tetris looks like geophysicaly. And they think they look sufficiently similar to justify an 800m deep diamond drillhole. As do the WA EIS who have chucked in $200,000 to back them up.
So there you go. I am mainly backing the technical skills and the experience of the Antipa team. These guys are good. And if they think there is a reasonable chance that Tetris could be another Havieron, then that is good enough for me. But drilling is a tough game and it takes time, so we might not know one way or the other for another week. Or maybe even one way or another for another six weeks, if the visuals are inconclusive but the gold assays are good.
The other missing pieces of the puzzle for us, with only the ASX release maps to go on, is what do the magnetics look like on the intervening gaps in the magnetic image, in the white areas outside the Antipa tenements in the picture below. Does Antipa have this magnetic image data? And if so, a) what does it tell them about the regional structural setting of Tetris,. and b) are there other similar 'Tetris/Havieron' red blobs, or are these two near identical features (plus perhaps 'Pixel' and the less well-defined Pacman features) completely unique and special in this area?
And then again, on the subject of the regional structural setting of the two red blobs at Havieron and Tetris, how important is it that each appear to lie within distinct NW-SE regional structural corridors that includes at least one other major mineral deposit?
ie:
1. The 'Tetris - Calibre/Magnum' corridor
2. The 'Havieron - Minyari/WACA - Winu/Ngapakarra' corridor
3. The 'Telfer - O'Callaghans' corridor
See my sketch below:
It's all very interesting, and potentially very promising.
But that is enough of my speculative time wasting for one day. Back to the real work!
Fingers X'd!
(20min delay)