Resource company expands drill programme and technical teams
Auryx Gold Corp, a Canadian growth-focused resource company, announced the expansion of the Otjikoto drill programme from its initial 12 month plan, July 2010 to June 2011, of 25,000m (15,000m of diamond drilling (“DD”) and 10,000m of reverse circulation drilling (“RC”)) to a new plan of approximately 42,000m for the same period. As of March 1st, the Company had drilled 41 DD holes for 11,500m and 85 RC holes for 7,000m, leaving 16,500m of DD and 7,000m of RC drilling to be completed by the end of June 2011. The Company has added a third DD rig on March 1st, and plans to add a fourth. The RC rig will be returned to the project by late April, at the end of the wet season.
One DD rig will be dedicated to the task of infill drilling the high-grade Western shoot with the intention of upgrading it from Inferred to Indicated. The infill drilling is estimated to require approximately 10,000m and 40 holes. The Company is targeting completion of approximately 5,000m by the end of June 2011, and this portion of the programme is included in the 42,000m.
The bulk of the drilling will be focused on testing exploration targets peripheral to the current resource at Otjikoto, most significantly in attempt to define a shoot (W1 shoot) on the southwestern margin of the current resource and a shoot (E1 shoot) on the eastern margin of the current resource. Other important targets to be tested include the downplunge extension of the Western shoot, a few follow-up holes to some major step-outs to the far east of the resource, and some widely spaced holes to the north of the current resource on the farm Wolfshag. The geology on Wolfshag is more structurally complex and a number of holes will be drilled on wide spacing in order to develop a better understanding of the structural impacts on the stratigraphy.
The 42,000m programme includes 1,500m for the testing of earlier stage targets kilometres to the south, but still within the Otjikoto geophysical anomaly. Auryx plans to continue testing earlier stage targets in the second half of 2011. Regional exploration of soil sampling, ground geophysics, and mapping will be initiated during this program with the goal of identifying drill targets for testing in subsequent budget periods.
To accommodate the increased drilling output and to initiate the regional prospecting programmes focused on generating targets elsewhere on the Company’s licenses, Auryx is expanding its technical team with the hiring of a database manager (which will free up a senior geologist currently on staff for field work), two junior geologists, and a senior field assistant. To address the bottleneck at the assay labs, the Company has arranged for Genalysis to establish a sample preparation facility at its operations in Walvis Bay, Namibia. The expanded prep facilities will decrease assay turnaround time to three weeks from the current six to eight weeks, after taking into account the Company’s higher rate of drilling.
