RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:Alpha ResponseGreat article!
People so quickly forget that Dev didn't really know what he had at PLS until Alpha hit with the drill.
He almost sold Fission's 50% share off to Denison as a throw in on the Waterbury deal for pennies on the dollar.
Few excerpts from the article posted by bfw:
Without money for field work, Garrett turned to searching through the Saskatchewan Mineral Assessment Database for potential finds. And in May 2008, when he was leafing through a 1977 CanOxy (now Nexen) report, something jumped off the page. A CanOxy geologist had identified radioactive anomalies near Patterson Lake, but wrote them off as likely caused by “exotic soils in the till.”
It was just a notation, but it was enough for the younger Ainsworth to head to the Southwestern Athabasca Region to stake the claims that would eventually yield a discovery.
Garrett Ainsworth had found in that old report what he believed to be an exceptional lead to the next great Athabasca uranium discovery. He wanted to pursue it right away, but dry exploration capital markets forced him to sit on his hands for more than two years.
“We knew there was something radioactive there, but we didn’t get back to do any work until June 2011,” he told me. “I was tossing and turning in my sleep every night for two years! Finally, the first day we went to investigate some of the anomalies, we came across three pitchblende (read: uranium) boulders!”
“We knew the boulders hadn’t come from very far, otherwise they would have eroded. By looking at them, it was game on, and just a matter of tracking down the bedrock source. I was there with an ice expert and everything he was saying was really positive. The ice direction made us look to the northeast.”
The elder Ainsworth loaned the company $550,000, banking on his gut feeling about the project, and his son’s instincts. This bridge financing led to Discovery Hole 22 coming in with over 21 meters of mineralization. And finally, the market responded.