The Davyhurst gold project has gifted Ora Banda Mining a grab bag of impressive drill results for Xmas with the first to be unwrapped, a stunning 19-metre intersection grading 24.5 grams per tonne gold from 63 metres downhole. The new intersection includes a 6.4-metre zone grading well over 2 ounces to the tonne at 71.6 g/t.
The ASX listed company has polished off the year with an 80-hole RC drilling campaign that targeted optimisation of existing resources and the testing of potential extensions to the open pit and even underground resources at depth at the Waihai gold complex.
Wahai is made up of the historical Waihi, Homeward Bound and Golden Pole deposits, collectively mined over about 100 years, for around 133,000 ounces of gold.
The results of Ora Banda’s recent drilling haven’t disappointed with another notable intercept of 10m grading 14.1g/t gold from 133m downhole giving an exciting indication of the potential down-plunge extensions of the high-grade Homeward Bound shoot.
Ora Banda Managing Director, David Quinlivan, said: “We remain very pleased that the excellent run of high-grade drilling results at Waihi has continued as we continue to progress with the resource estimation update.
“The confirmation of the down-plunge continuity of the high grade Homeward Bound shoots is also pleasing and remains a key focus of future exploration activities at Waihi.”
Management said that a resource update is scheduled for early in the new year with the current resource for Waihi standing at 914,000 tonnes grading 2.4g/t for 71,000 gold ounces.
Ora Banda’s Davyhurst gold project is located 120km northeast of Kalgoorlie where it houses a mothballed, 1.2 million tonne per annum processing plant with a combined total resource of over 1.7 million ounces.
WA’s Eastern Goldfields have slowly reawakened in recent times courtesy of a skyrocketing gold price and few dedicated juniors who have carefully dusted off the cobwebs from old geological maps and taken punts drilling in new directions.
Ora Banda is one of those small companies that has gone back to basics and used the fundamentals of geological science to reinterpret old gold deposits – particularly those with exciting high-grade zones.
The ASX listed company has successfully snagged a number of lodes well beyond anything the old-timers could have imagined.
2020 is shaping up to be an exciting year for the Ora Banda team with definitive feasibility studies, resource updates and exploration drilling all happening at once.
Is your ASX listed company doing something interesting ? Contact : matt.birney@businessnews.com.au
