Exploration of the Navilawa Caldera As has been said, the Navilawa caldera has been surprisingly underexplored.
A company called Mincor had the concessions for a long time and then handed it off to Golden Rim Resources........Mincor never followed through on their planned drilling at Banana Creek after they had drilled five holes in 1999. . likely, primarily due to the low gold price. (3 of the holes of which LIO now says were misplaced) "This drilling confirmed the existence of a high-grade epithermal gold system, with the intersection of a classic Fijian-style gold vein containing 23.4g/t gold over a true width of approximately 40cm. The vein was intersected at 32.65m downhole in fresh rock indicating that the gold is primary and not the result of supergene enrichment.
The mineralised vein has characteristics similar to those of the adjacent Tuvatu deposit and the nearby Vatukoula Mine. The intersected vein is likely to be related to later stage epithermal mineralisation overprinted on an earlier porphyry event. Later stage epithermal activity is responsible for the development of high-grade mineralisation at Vatukoula and Tuvatu.
Petrographic studies on the drill core confirm the epithermal nature of the veining and indicate a palaeo-depth of formation of about 300m, near the top of the gold bearing zone. As the vein was intersected at a depth of 30m, this means that the bulk of the gold mineralisation at Banana Creek is likely to be still present and not eroded away."
Nothing was done at Mincor's Fiji projects until eight years later, when in 2007 they JV'd Sabeto, (the caldera) to the just formed Golden Rim Resources. (Mincor went predominantly into nickel mining.)
After looking through GRR's reports it appears they only really worked on Navilawa/Sabeto for a year or so. Out of 3000 meters of drilling planned, it seems they only did 1600 meters, none of which were at Banana Creek. They drilled a couple of holes at Central Ridge and at Tuvatu North but didn't find a lot. (LIO people think they may not have used the correct modeling)
They drilled a couple of holes near the old Kingston Mine. About the Kingston area they wrote, Nov 2007, in a Presentation for a mining conference: "1km x .5 km gold in soil and potasium anomaly newly discovered. 'Tuvatu style'veins grading up to 9.9 g/t gold."
The company didn't have a lot of funding. No work was performed in the first quarter of 2008 and then they wound up joining with an Arab group in Aug 2008. Together they started concentrating on copper/gold in Sweden, gold in Africa and other places so it looks like little work was performed after the end of 2007. (bad call leaving Navilawa--their other projects don't seem to have panned out)
GRR did do extensive stream, soil, and and chip sampling over a large area, while they were there. (1,400 samples they say) . The company did a lot of 'fault finding' , and mapping as well as building roads and refurbishing old ones. They found new prospects: Sleeping Giant west of Kingston, and a large anomaly NE of Banana creek, as well as delineating other known prospects. All in all, they did a lot of work there which provides a lot of value to the next explorer at the caldera. (thankyou very much)
Lion's Navilawa news release correlates with Golden Rim's soil sampling, in that, evidence of gold is found outside of the caldera also, and not just the mapped area inside. (from LION news release : "Extensive mineralized system with surface gold anomalism inside and extending outside the 7 kilometre wide caldera rim. (from Golden Rim, "the sample indicates the occurrence of mineralised veins outside the main caldera structure. This locality, ( Namaravua Creek.) is 4.3km north of the Banana Creek prospect. 3 km north of the caldera) A map on the website shows the large, heavy duty gravity signature extending north and to the east of the caldera. So not only are there the many prospects around Tuvatu and in the original tenements plus all the prospects inside the caldera, there also very large areas outside of the caldera to explore.
Berukoff states a goal of providing job opportunities for generations to come.
Looks like not only for miners but also geologist/prospectors.