@Jopie This is exactly right. Like allcompanies, but especially resource companies’ who are not yet in production, weare always having to make the hard decisions between how to spend our limitedfunds, and that means adjusting plans, like drilling, when the market and financialliquidity conditions are tough like we are seeing at present. At Nova we employstrict capital allocations which we review regularly. If we had unlimited funds,we would love to have lots of drill rigs drilling everywhere across the projectas that’s one of the great things about Estelle, there are so many amazing prospectsacross the project area, including the Shoeshine area we announced today whichhad a rock sample of 1,290 g/t Au, which each one in themselves could becompany making. But we don’t have unlimited funds and shareholders don’t likedilution, especially at these SP’s, so we have to make some hard decisionsbased on the best available info at the time and employ those funds where wethink it makes the most sense. Talking with shareholders and looking at thecurrent market, we already have a large resource base, shareholders have toldus they don’t want us to endlessly drill, so we feel the best value for moneycurrently is the strategic review which is looking specifically at how we canget Estelle into production sooner at a lower initial capital cost. Once inproduction free cash flow then can then be used to explore the remainder of theproject without further dilution to shareholders. Remember this is a districtscale project that we have at Estelle which is very rare outside of the majors.This review has come about from some of our initial PFS test work which has shownwe need to do more work on heap leaching for example as new methods have beendeveloped since the last test work was completed and as announced we haveemployed a highly reputable firm, which is also used by many of the largemining companies, METS Engineering in Perth, to conduct this work.
Train and Trumpet are both very goodlooking prospects, and we will do more work on them in the future, but as wesaid in the announcement drilling is always fluid and decisions are made as itprogresses and this year it was decided to reduce the amount of drilling mainlyto conserve funds for other priorities (the strategic review and the testingassociated with it) and also due to the weather. Alaska had a short and coldsummer season this year with snow arriving to the area much earlier thananticipated, so while we can drill all year round it is more expensive to do soas you have to for example put heaters on the pipes to stop the water essentialfor diamond drilling from freezing, etc.. Although we didn’t get as much drillingcompleted as we hoped, we did comparatively well when you look at US GoldMiningnext door which were drilling at much lower elevations and in their prospectussaid they would drill 20,00m, then announced 10,00m and then actually onlydrill 1,674m in over 4 months this year.
Regarding the drilling at Train. Whileit didn’t get the results we all hoped for, you have to remember that this isresource exploration and all drilling provides the geos with more valuable dataabout what is going on underground and helps with planning future drill campaigns.We use pathfinders such as surface sampling, etc..to provide indicators of the bestlikely places to drill and then subject to funding test drill the areas. AtEstelle these pathfinders have proved very reliable in the past with the Korbeland RPM discoveries. As Hans said admittedly this 1st pad was farfrom the from the heart of the mineralized system but with what we saw in the surfaceexploration program assay results at Train/Trumpet we are still very confidentof finding a large deposit in this area. I also think we have all got use tosome incredible drill results like we had at RPM and now expect those everytime, which while very nice is not necessarily realistic, and as Hans remindedme today, even the grades of the soil and rock samples that we are seeing andannouncing now would be considered great on other gold projects. Having saidthat the geos still believe that there are other high grade blow zones acrossthe district like RPM waiting to be discovered.
As for antimony. This is not adistraction from the gold as some have claimed on here. We are still a goldcompany through and through. We didn’t go looking for the antimony it found usin the multi-element assay results as it was coincident with the gold. When welooked further to see what antimony was, as like most people we had never heardof it before, we found that it was a very scarce critical mineral which the USwants a domestic supply for so consequently as announced we are now looking tosee what grants/funding might be available to us to explore it further from variousUS Govt departments.
And lastly. As shown by the surfacesampling assay announcements, Assays are now starting to flow regularly fromthe lab and we expect a lot more to come in, along with the drill results forRPM North and RPM Valley as well, in the coming weeks. As of today we are onlyabout 8 weeks since drilling stopped and unlike some companies we test a lot ofour core for multi-elements which takes longer as there are more tests requiredto test for all the different elements and this extra testing for example is howwe made the antimony discovery as well in the sample results. Pre-covid assayswere typically coming back in 8-10 weeks depending on the amount of core in thelab, so the assays results this year, while a few weeks longer than pre-covidtimes, are still a lot quicker than last year where some results were taking upto 6 months to come back.
Hope this answers a few questions from posterson here and provides more clarification as well. My mobile number is at the bottom of every announcement so please feel free to call me anytime.
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