Estimated date for first and last drill results?Yes, I am sure there are at least a few unknowns. That makes it hard to estimate timing of the start and end of the results flow from our 10,000-meter drilling program. I’m no geologist or drill operator. But it’s fun to guess while we’re waiting.
I couldn’t find any online info on how much core a diamond drill produces daily, but I seem to recall for a geologically similar project it was 100-150 meters per day per drill.
My understanding of FDR’s official announcement is they expect drilling to start end of June with one drill. The second will come online a few weeks later. If we produce 125 meters per day for, say, 21 days, and 250 meters per day thereafter, we get 2,625 meters drilled by July 21st and 10,000 meters by August 20th.
That makes no allowance for breakdowns, additional crew training requirements, and perhaps most importantly, any pauses for planning/altering new targets as results start arriving.
But here is where FDR may have a big advantage if the Suriname lab turnaround is as fast as we’ve heard. Because shaving 6-10 weeks off lab processing times shouldn’t just bring the end-date of the last results forward by 6-10 weeks. Ideally, it ought to make the entire drill program much more efficient at finding the gold.
I guess I don’t know exactly what drillers do while waiting for results to start coming in… keep drilling blind as best they can, I suppose. Move drills around to begin all the different targets so as to minimize wasted drilling maybe - although that corrective could itself waste a fair bit of time. Whatever it is, they’d probably much prefer to have the lab results in hand. Jump in here, anyone, if you know the answers better than me.
Purely speculative investors presumably make up many, often the majority, of the shareholders in any junior explorer. For them, the overall pace of drill results is secondary to the question of when the first high-powered result might be reported. Or when the news release might arrive that first causes the coherent image of a large deposit to credibly take shape.
But the whole game in all its glory is truly beautiful to behold.
Good luck to us all.