Tom,
Lori has said in the Conference Call of a week ago, that these message boards are tabloids and that misinformation gets spread on them, and that they should not be relied upon for investment purposes. I agree with her 100%. Although Agoracom seems to be one of the more sensible boards to discuss our SLI investment on, everyone has to keep in mind that these are only opinions and speculation here. The only facts are what is written in NR,s, SLI website, financials and MD&A, by the company. The problem arises when the facts are misinterpreted, and this seems to happen with SLI all the time. This is where the speculation starts, from that misinterpretation, and the funniest thing about it all, is that which misinterpretation do you believe?
Now, we do DO small scale mining, or at least we have on the C-1 and A-4 in the past. So, Lori,s remark about us being a miner is true, and it has held true for a number of years now. From this point, is where I started to speculate, and made a suggestion that maybe we might start mining again? I threw this on the board, as I thought it worthy of discussion, by putting the facts together that consisted of Lori saying she was gonna try to get as much out of the ground as quickly as she could and the word development had been entered alongside exploration. I created my own interpretation of what may be happening, but it is all speculation and I thought this avenue could be discussed again.
Where I was coming from, I wanted to look at the pro,s and con,s again, of doing some small scale mining while drilling and see how this scenario would fit in our plan. I believe it was stated that bulk sampling would be part of the trenching plan, but I can,t verify this at this time. Bulk sampling, is more or less mining, it gives you a pretty good representation of the mill grade and has been the mining proceedure at the Tesoro. By looking at our speculative research, I believe it could be said that the average gold grade from veins mined in the region is around 15 g/t. We have veins with grades higher than this, for ex; the C-1 comes in around 30 g/t, or slightly higher.
The last known vein to be found on the property was the N-1 vein. This vein was found in the summer of 2010 as a result of proof testing the Titan at surface, a sample taken from this new found vein assayed 2.5 oz per ton. If we were to bulk sample/mine this vein at surface while we were trenching, and this ~75 g/t stayed consistant, you could be putting serious money into the treasury while still exploring, like we have done in the past. It was a small hole/trench dug to find this vein, so the possibility that more will be found during trenching, would seem favourable to me. Say if you found 2 more veins with this kind of grade at surface, it would take no time to scoop along the surface and take maybe 50 m lengthx2m deep= ~150 tonnes x 2.5 oz/t = 375 ozs@ $1000 per ounce= $375,000. If you could do this with 3 veins over a 1 month period, you could have $1 million to do further exploration work with. If the property is as rich as we think, this little bit mined from it will not hurt.
Either way, Lori will decide whats best for us all. I am speculating that she would opt to prove up and sell the property as quickly as possible, that way its more money, quicker in everyones pockets, versus mining this out for years. But there is definitely nothing wrong with a bit of mining thrown into the mix as we go along the phases of proving this up.
As usual, this is speculationon my part and IMO.
