Member Info for strudel

@Bamps

"Wibbly wobbly"....?
These geological technical terms are bamboozling me....
;-)

Sentinel is having a tease this morning. It briefly showed a thumbnail of a new radar image but wouldn't load the full image. It was also dated 2nd March which cannot be right unless Sentinel 1 is plummeting earthwards out of its orbit or the spin on the earth has wobbled.

Will leave it to sort itself out whilst I forage for breakfast. (Sainsbury's, rather easier than catching a sheep unawares in a field, peeling it and roasting a chunk.)

......I see the very welcome LSE broom of admin has swept through last night's board.

Meanwhile switching back to Sentinel...

There was a new daylight image on the 11th which may not have been noticed courtesy of the 14/14 { superlative } adjective from NC being the major entertainment that morning. I had a chance on a full size screen to compare and contrast and can say not one single drill changed. However there was all sorts of activity all around particularly with the box cut. The temperature is mid 30s with some rain so moving rigs may be a continuing nightmare.

I then had a look for a radar image and think it is either overdue or I cannot count through the 12 day gap correctly.

If NC only have access to eight rigs (rather than their intended nine nor hoped for twelve) does that put a pro rata percentage of their 65,000m of infill drilling in jeopardy? They need to have the last cores out of the ground and in the lab by end of May if there is still a three month lab delay before they put figures into a PFS by September. They could get results by end of August and have four weeks to crunch numbers to get that report written up, double checked and published before October starts.

.....still thinking about the 26 results we saw mid week. I think I'd extrapolated that 18 were potentially stuck in labs from pre-Christmas drilling. Those guys in that desert heat are fairly chomping through the drilling. I wonder if they have a "best core" competition on the go between each drill team?

@TimberT
Your DDH1 info might explain why NC can only get eight rigs active at HAV, I'm sure they wanted to go to 12 and had nine for a short while.

The radar image is usually the only sure fire way to double check what is active on the ground.

Thanks Q55, more awake now (marginally) to understand the reply.

Went back through NC exploration reports and found this 5000m offset was started in the previous set of results. Did anyone spot this at the time? Apologies if it's me that missed it.

They don't do this offset at Red Chris but their datum is already 1500m up a northern Canadian mountain (brr, brr, brrrrrrr) and they don't need to drill so deep to their gold.

HAV is at 265m.

Which got me to thinking why choose an offset of 5000m?

I'm fairly certain if you choose an offset you only want to do so once during the lifetime (ten years plus?) of proving up an asset, starting to mine while drilling around looking for more ore. It would be chaos to try and refer to historic drill datasets with one offset with more recent drills using another.

400m of this offset gets used up to get through the cover material. Let's presume they have roughly double that down the bottom end to make sure deep exploration drill holes don't cross into negative numbers - so a 1000m buffer zone.

This leaves them from 4,600m to 1,000m of depths to play around in finding ore. 3.6km at depth! I'm still getting my head round that....

The deepest Oz mine at the moment at 1800m (thanks to whoever mentioned that last night) which if we matched that on our offset scale would be a HAV mine from 4,600 to 3,200m of useful extraction.

The deepest South African mines go about 3,000m down....so current technology would allow HAV to expand ore extraction from 3,200 to 2,000m on our offset scale.

Which leaves another 1000m of headroom on our offset scale that someone at Newcrest thinks future technologies in the foreseeable will come along to make really realky deep mining possible.

All presuming the ore body keeps going to those kind of depths.....

I'm going to mull over the size of that block cave in 30 years time while munching my morning croissant.

Is there something very odd with the figures in the RL column? I thought it referred to the length they had drilled, with the depth showing how far they are from the surface when they report mineralisation. The numbers all seem to be circa 5,000 which doesn't make sense to me.

To tired to suss it out tonight......

Someone will explain I'm sure.

@Burble
I think we were "missing" 18 HAV results in the last update from Newcrest. If they report more than 18 this week then we may be able to judge if the lab delays are still circa 3 months. It sounds as if the last four Scallywag drills are not yet ready for an RNS - although that may be related to the fact that GGP technical resources are busy planning a Juri JV drill programme - spending other people's money rather than our own.

Patience.

Good ole HAD005, I wonder if I can buy a metre and a half of that core for the display case on the wall above the fireplace, with a print out from the RNS to frame beside it? Only once Callum's done with it....

If I was a gambler,
....hold on, I am....
I reckon we're going to get ~18 drill core results from before Christmas and not much more in the Tuesday / Wednesday NC update. The last four Scallywag results would be nice to see, perhaps if they are "dull" (also known as not HAD005 v2) they are best realeased at a similar time to Newcrest's news. I'm not a neutral observor I admit. Having bought more last week at sub 22p I am now definitely not going to add anymore, never, ever, no, no no..... Not until GGP is bought out in its entirety.... I promise not to find anymore money to take advantage of these daft dips. I dare say it will get dafter....

If the lab delays don't reduce from the current 3 months to the more normal 5-6 weeks it could well be the entire Paterson Winter 2021 drilling season is done and dusted without a single result being published. Makes for lengthened exploration programmes if you don't have the air-conditioned infrastructure of a NC style operation available to keep on site drilling all year.

Patience.

@TM1
I think my gadget gets stuck loading cached pages rather than new from Sentinel. New link worked fine....image seems less crisp than the last few which were fantastic.

@PG
Hope the board isn't going to descend into talking ****e all weekend. Get a lot of that during the week when there's no real news to analyze. Next week should be better with another batch of HAV results.

@EOW
Need to compare two images on a a decent sized screen to work out what is new. My impression is that they are staying for longer at the same drill pads doing lots of infill drilling, I guess to get as much more detail for the MRE updates if they are aiming for a feasibility study by September. If there are continuing lab delays of circa 3 months then they will only be able to officially include drill results obtained by mid-June. Sandeep et al will of course know fairly accurately every week what is being discovered.

INHO, they are not drill pads. Been there a while, no radar echo, so I'm thinking waste handling site.

My version of Sentinel is only showing the 1st March image. ..... it does this just to tease me sometimes.

I reckoned they were patching up some of the wetter bits of nearby track with some of the spoil, along with making new tracks with the material - it is currently very white compared to the red topsoils / sand.

Checked the weather out of curiosity for when drilling may restart on neighbouring tenements. After a relatively cool February it is back to +40C this week.

Patience.....

...and I forgot to say the radar shows nothing at the tightly spaced line of holes 600m west of Lake Havieron seen the other day - so we can presume its puddles of drying out mud.

Looks like there may be one drill pad in the east. And a very curious bit of activity close to the point where the one sand dune splits into two about mid way between Lake Havieron and our box cut.

Gotta go....
Things to do...
Places to be....
Cups of tea to drink....

I think it's rainy season oddities. There are sometimes odd spots which I presume is vegetation reacting to moisture. I'm using too small a screen to compare to 2020's image from a similar date, but reckon they are also too close together to be drill locations.

Is the row about 600m west of Lake Havieron - tightly packed?

All the earth scraping visible clearly here today in the cleared of vegetation setting:

https://apps.sentinel-hub.com/eo-browser/?zoom=15&lat=-21.72614&lng=122.64456&themeId=DEFAULT-THEME&datasetId=S2L2A&fromTime=2021-02-24T00%3A00%3A00.000Z&toTime=2021-02-24T23%3A59%3A59.999Z&layerId=3_NDVI&visualizationUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fservices.sentinel-hub.com%2Fogc%2Fwms%2Fbd86bcc0-f318-402b-a145-015f85b9427e

Had a quick look at drilling rigs. South, north amd north-east, nothing really west or east. Need a radar to be certain about where they are (or aren't).

@PaddyG, the drill pad just north east of the boxcut seems to have stopped. It looks like there's two drills active beyond the sand dunes. I wonder if they were double checking the edge of the planned decline route was still going to be sterile having found more southern breccias?

It sure is a long six weeks between updates.

Had005, oh Had005

An instantaneous "they will mine this!"

I've had a chance to look at the 14th & 19th Feb daylight images and I don't think a single drill has changed location. I guess this may be what the majority of the next 64,000m of drilling is going to look like - lots of infill, fanning out from the same spot.

If this turns out to be our destiny for the next few months the only topic left for us to over analyse on this forum will be "when will they have enough new data to update their MRE?" And perhaps a frisson of excitement from trying to guess if it will be an update from the northern, western or southern breccias. Or a combination of them?

That NE pad does indeed seem relatively close to the box cut / decline....

Could it be proving there is nothing useful to mine anywhere near the decline, it seems to be between the original sterilisation holes and the southern parts of HAV.

Or even looking at the geology of what they will go through when they excavate the decline?

I'm presuming its too early to do major work associated with a future air vent?