EOFY closing in!, page-54

Not by law. By regulation. But you can't issue results until you have the final assays. And as anyone who has ever run an RC drilling program will tell you, the industry-standard cost-effective procedure is as follows:

1. You take 4m composite samples for each hole and submit them for assay, to obtain a rough idea of the intervals where you will then take the 1m splits.

2. Once you have those results, then you go back to the drill samples and take 1m splits over those better intervals and submit them for final assay. This saves a great deal of money.

3. Throughout the process, you add in 'standard' check samples that have a range of precisely known grades plus some of zero grade blank samples, usually after every 20th sample, to keep a check on the accuracy of the lab results. And if any of these standard check sample lab results do not correspond to their known grades, you have to go back to the lab, or to another lab and have the samples reassayed.

It is all standard procedure, without which your results would not have the integrity to be included in a JORC gold resource calculation. But of course it takes a long time, as doing things correctly always does.

And the other factors at play here of course are that there is a massive gold exploration boom going on, and we are at the height of the Autumn/Winter drilling season, so the labs are flat tack, and they process samples as fast as their capacity allows.

The main constraint on their sample throughput is having enough drying ovens to dry each batch of 200 samples before they can each be crushed and then milled to a fine powder ready for acid solution and assay. And if you go into the yard of any West Kalgoorlie assay lab right now, you will see STACKS of samples, from hundreds of different companies, all waiting weeks to take their turn in sample prep. That's just how it is.

So no need to worry. There is nothing wrong. This is to be expected right now. It's a gold boom.