| Now that Alton has taken its drill rig away, it’s natural to reflect on Siren’s situation. |
| It took Alton 2 months, from mid Feb to mid Apr, to drill hole number 108 which is 541m deep, so we expect it would have taken them around a month to drill the second one (hole 109), branching off from 108 about halfway down and going another 300m (see ‘deep holes’ diagram attached, from Siren’s 14 May presentation.) They apparently got straight on with it while they had the rig in place. That suggests they were done drilling in mid-May. Back in mid Feb they were planning to drill two extra holes branching off the main one, but it seems they’ve decided not to drill the second branch-off, presumably in view of what they have found out so far from the main hole and its first branch. Assay results (the chemical analysis of whether any gold is there) for hole 109 could be available by mid-June. All Siren have said (on 17 Apr) is that hole 108 intersected a 23m thick section of the dyke between 487m and 510m deep. They pointed their X-ray machine at the cores, and it found arsenic in them, but the crucial question is how much gold is there. Previous assay results have given gold content metre by metre, as shown in the ‘deep holes’ diagram [above]. We gather it takes about a month to get results back from a lab so Siren should have them for hole 108 by now, though they have not released any information. We expect that if they had found something really rich, we would have heard all about it because they’d post it on ASX to boost their share price. On the other hand (though this is not their usual modus operandi), they may be waiting for the assay results on the branch hole (109) so they can release both together. The larger question is what the plan is, behind this deep drill-hole project. Siren has only made marginal refinements on how much gold CRA found in the 1980s One option would have been for them to do ‘infill drilling’ (as they have mentioned in their ASX releases) to raise their confidence in those inferred reserves so that they can borrow finance to mine them. However, this is not what they have done, which raises the question as to why, when it would give them more working capital to continue to explore the further reaches of the deposit. Perhaps despite their upbeat ASX releases Siren knows that mining what CRA walked away from is marginal at best. But the growing impression is that the deep hole project is about something else. Reading between the lines in Siren’s various ASX releases it seems Siren, through its geologist Paul Angus, has been hoping to find some kind of deep ‘mother lode’ of gold that is the source of the various bits CRA discovered at relatively shallow depths. This is what the tantalizing purple blob is about, shown deep underground in their ASX announcements (see Magnetic anomaly images attached). Our feeling is that this is most likely a personal dream of Paul’s. He is after all the only actual geologist Siren has and his working method has been going back over other miners’ previous projects to see if he can find something that everyone else has missed (think for instance of their antimony prospect in the Sounds and what they’re enthusing about in the Reefton Area). by Andrew Yuill and Sams Creek Collective Statement from Siren Gold Paul Angus recently told local journalist Nina Hindmarsh, “We’ve drilled two holes and now we’ve completed these and now waiting on the lab” and when asked when the results would be publicly available, he said “Maybe in a month’s time. That’s always what we’d planned all along, depends on what comes out of the results and what money we can raise. It’s all a work in progress.” |
