the australian's west af. gold pick for 2011

Quoting from the The Australian Newspaper, 05 January 2011, Page 16, in the Business section:


THE EXPERT'S PICKS FOR 2011

Australian Business Desk:

"Drake Resources DRK: Missed out on the West Africa Gold Boom? Don't worry: Drake is about to drill in Mauritania, near the Tasiast Mine"




I can't help but agree with the Australian's sentiments:

The background to this little snippet is that Drake has licenses just to the south of the Tasiast gold deposit in southern Mauritania. Tasiast is the new discovery that has put Mauritania on the map and started the current gold rush there.

Tasiast occurs in the same 'Birimian' aged Archaean-Proterozoic greenstone belt rocks that have produced the current rash of monster gold discoveries elsewhere in West Africa, and it is indeed a monster: currently 12 million ounces of gold, and growing. There hasn't been anything like that found in WA for a very long time!

Drake were already in Mauritania before the present gold rush started there, through their association with stable-mate uranium explorer Aura Energy, so they had first mover advantage when things started to hot up. They have so far amassed over 8,000 square kilometres of prospective ground, including large areas of soil gold anomalism over regionally-extensive shear zones with undrilled gold mineralisation outcropping at surface.

They currently have a market capitalisation of just $23m and over $7.5m in cash, and have three major projects: The Swedish base metals/gold JV, which is being funded by the Royal Falcon alliance, the Finnish base metals JV, which is being funded by Panoramic Resources, and the Mauritanian gold project, which is self-funded.

Drake are about to start a major exploration programme in Mauritania, which will include the drilling of previously-untested, out-cropping gold occurences in several different areas.

The immediate hope is that one of these undrilled areas may prove to be a million-ounce-plus gold discovery, but even if this isn't the immediate case, they will be reporting the drilling and assaying of gold-bearing mineralisation right from the start, and have numerous other less-advanced gold targets to work up at the same time, for ongoing drilling throughout the field season. Their Mauritanian projects are by no means a one-trick pony!

The stock is tightly held and is highly responsive to good news and to positive developments, so it should benefit significantly from any announcement of positive drilling results in Mauritania (or to positive results from forthcoming drilling of the recently acquired base metals VTEM survey over the Panoramic JV areas).

I have my own view on where the stock could run to with just some initial positive gold results from the drilling in Mauritania, though I wouldn't post that sort of speculation here, but I like the facts am certainly in for the long term, not the short term.

(And pay no attention to me of course.. I am just a boring old gold geologist, not a clever financial adviser. So do your own research and make up your own minds! Good luck..)