Drilling is a bit slow here, but some of the forecasts of drilling are a little out here by some of the posters. At a high level, essentially it is 50 - 70 metres drilling per day for Diamond Drilling, assuming drilling only in daylight hours (so can be shorter if set up with spotlights to drill longer under night time conditions). Get more drill metres per day if it was RC drilling, but DD is more accurate btw. Appears too me they are using Diamond Drills I suspect given the AGM presentation stated the drills were ES$DD001 - 004 (as DD stands for Diamond Drill I presume).
Cost of drilling is also embedded in the link below, and costs depend exactly what rig you are looking at as well, and obviously how more cheaper is it to drill in Ecuador compared to Oz. Whilst the below link is an old article, for example, in terms of DD in Oz for $0.4 million gets you about 624 metres of diamond core for example. The STM Ann suggests exploration and evaluation costs of A$0.819 million, which too me is the drilling plus other exploration costs in other no-drilled tenements (refer back to the Ann on work been done) as well as any carry over costs of the previous program into the September quarter, refer some of the comments in July quarterly Post #: 46175204) but suggests drilling costs here are on the 'higher' side but possibly not as high as some are alluding to on these threads (but still a concern in part) because you don't have a complete breakdown of what that $819,000 cost involves. Be interesting what the $400,000 separately reported staff and admin/corporate costs are, but suspect they are tenement management and other type costs included in there etc etc
Drilling meters per day ultimately boils down to the drill head and whether you can drill for 24 hours or not. Depending on the head you probably could drill 5 metres to 7 metres of core per hour (depending on the rock you are drilling into). Assuming 12 hours of drilling per day in natural light, 5 metres per hour, and a depth of 150 metres, will take you about 3 days per drill. Notewould appear drilling started about 10 sepetmber based on a previous Ann.
If using one drill rig, probably add a day or two to move and set up the drill in a new location to dril. So 4 holes to 150 metres each and adding 4 - 8 days to move the rigs around and set it up, would theoretically take about 16 - 20 days to complete IMO the four holes. So this would suggest the drilling is more difficult here in part is my point, so will be interesting why that is and STM haven't said a lot - i.e. are they drilling less than 12 hours per day or is the terrain a little more difficult to stabilise the drill rig so less metres been drilled per day or is the rock type been drilled into more difficult to drill into etc etc etc)
Would probably send every 1 to 2 cores to the lab, so adding 4 weeks should be getting initial results soon, say by mid November, and then staged from there.
(20min delay)