In an act of serendipity, I ran into the drillers who worked for...

In an act of serendipity, I ran into the drillers who worked for Barrick when they were drilling at Tim's Dome for the Telfer JV with MTB. They reckon its the most horrible ground they've ever encountered; vuggy quartz which ate drill rods, no water return at all for 200m, they'd start a hole with RC, get to 300m and have the throw the whole set of rods out because the ground had worn them out, put down PQ rods and drill 50m before they became bogged, then go down with HQ, get another 50m down, and so on and so forth until, somehow they made it to 1000m to target depth, at the cost of probably half a million bucks a hole just for drilling, or so they estimated.

The driller said that he was so torqued off about the whole experience, his boss had to charter a plane to deliver a packet of winnie blues to the drill site just to keep him drilling.

Now, we don't know what they got down there, but it stands to reason Barrick wouldn't have pulled out of the JV without good reason - they are pretty smart guys, and they wouldn't walk away from 150 million ounces of gold without a damn good reason. Maybe the drilling costs, at half a mill a pop, were too much. I'd hesitate to say it, but I wouldn't even bother chasing a target at 1,000m depth through that sort of ground. To prove JORC on a gold deposit you need more than a half dozen holes into the ground, so when you think of drilling 100, 200, 500 holes to get a JORC at a kilometre depth....at that cost...yeesh.

So I reckon thats why they are having a bit of trouble finding a JV partner. When I found this out recently, it confirmed my worries about the degree of clarity being displayed by management. And now, at 3.8c, with 12 million Opes shares going to be crossed to a new player off market - if ANZ can sell them! - I'm thinking the ONLY good that can come out here is Anglo or Exxaro picking up those 12M shares and having a tilt in order to get Kihabe and sort it out with real money and expertise.