ASX closed Monday, while most of you are feet up enjoying a public holiday, don't worry, us Queenslanders will be hard at it keep the country afloat...
Hopefully Richard got his fuel and supplies on time and will have both the mine and the plant up and running by Monday. It will most likely depend on how much water needs pumping and if any additional work is needed to make the mine safe. The news flow this week should be good, May production by the end of the week all going well and an update on the drilling can not be far away also.
Like I have mentioned before, the May production will most likely be the market focus, unless we get something unexpected from exploration. I hope the production numbers are put into some meaningful context, such as how much production was lost due to the strike and how much is expected to be lost this month as a hangover from the strike. I would expect that the strike has delayed hammer mill 4 by more than the duration of the strike as the back log of freight would be considerable and the hammer mill would be down the list a bit. I would be happy to see it on site and ready to run for next month at this stage, but we will see. It is not just the mill it's self, it's all the assorted equipment needed, form the foundations to the piping and pumps needed to set it up. Who knows what is sitting around in the ports waiting to get put onto a truck. Cement powder and gravel for the concrete could be another victim of the strike.
Let's hope this is the "show me the gold" week we have all been waiting for what seems like an eternity.... They where hoping to more or less cover costs this month, the expected out flow for the quarter was ~2.9 million AUD, so near enough to one million a month, so we need around 600 oz to replace these funds. That million includes everything except the gold stream payments, add that on top is another 150 oz, so all in around 750 oz for the month. To date we have never produced anything like that amount, so anything even close will be a massive step forward. I think 500 oz would be a very good result, but even 300 or 400 would be a giant leap forward, as long as it is quantified by what the impact from the strike was and we can extrapolate a production number that would have run close to the 600 oz mark.
Set some realistic expectations and not set ourselves up to be disappointed with what the reality is... Still early days for the rebirth of what we all hope is a mine that could, should, be a money maker.
