Drilling strategy - contemplate carefully! There seems to be a lot of emotion on this board... excited anticipation and dreams of grandeur.
Management needs to be concerned, careful and contemplative. How do you follow up a hole that grades for every meter? Expectations are extremely high.
Management doesn't want to sink a number of holes until they have more information to tie geology together. The sound approach is to leave one drill on Bhutia and a second drill on FDP. Bhutia drill should step out to the west towards FDP discovery hole. The goal would be to see if they can tie the two deposits together and identify a source..
The second drill on the FDP will first be looking for the vertical thickness of a cap structure and the vertical depth of the mineral bearing rock. They could drill it vertical at the beginning of the discovery hole or a vertical at the end of the discovery hole. The safest play would be to drill a vertical in the middle of the hole, but it would provide the least amount of information. The most informational drill hole would be to step out 100 m to the west of the middle of the discovery hole and drill at either 30° to 60° slope with a 80° to 100° azimuth. The goal being to cross cut the current discovery hole. Assuming they can quickly exit the caprock on the west side, and then continue through mineralization while cross cutting the discovery hole and extend again through mineralization at least 100 m to the east of th discovery hole. Hopefully they could both cross the fault line to the east of the discovery hole and possibly tie into the geology of Bhutia, on the other side of the fault.
The hole I just described would contain a significant amount of information.
The hole could be good and show existing continuity, significant width and depth of mineralization, and could possibly also tie the Bujia deposit to the discovery hole.
A bad outcome from the same hole would also be very useful because it would provide information about the width of mineralization, and whether or not the mineralization rock changes once you cross the fault, and might not tie into the geology of Bhutia. While this outcome is negative it would provide much insight on drilling of subsequent holes.
I would put a SWAG probability of 80% being a successful hole with useful information versus 20% being a disappointing hole with useful information.
Depending on what management finds out with that second hole would determine whether or not, they would consider bringing a third rig to the property, two drills on FDP and one drill on Bhutia.
They should continue to keep one drill on Bhutia to better understand structural controls and stratigraphy and look for indicators minerals that they can follow with the drill. They should try to tie Bhutia geology to FTP geology.
Management should take considerable time and analyze their options based on core feedback. Following up the discovery hole will be a real challenge. The market has unreasonable expectations and most people don't understand geology. So the first holes will be risky and we should cut them some slack. Don't judge too quickly on the results. After they've plugged about 6-8 holes in and around the discovery hole.They will have a much better chance at starting to understand the geology. At this point the second hole is another blind hole and we should be patient with whatever the outcome is.
I am bullish on them finding a substantial volume of material that will continually grade 1-2.5 gpt. I believe management has stumbled upon a large system that turns out to be a low grade bulk deposit… Actually much sexier than a high-grade, narrow deposit that's hard to follow. Abulk deposit is easy to follow. And can be very profitable if there's a lot of it.
Remember they already have over 1 million ounces that they could blend in with low grade material… You can make a lot of money doing that. By the way… My estimate on the discovery hole was that they found between 200k - 300k ounces just with the discovery hole (assumed specific gravity of 2.6 and continuous grading of 1.1 gpt Au.