Middle Island Resources looks to be onto a third new gold discovery in as many weeks at its Sandstone gold project in Western Australia with the new “Old Town Well” deposit igniting interest following a phase one RC drilling program. The company is looking to translate good results from ongoing drilling into further resource expansions that will eventually support the recommissioning of its mothballed Sandstone mill.
The Rick Yeates-led ASX-listed company recently tabled an impressive five-fold increase to its global mineral resource at Sandstone, bringing the total ounces across the project areas to 624,000 ounces of gold.
Old Town Well has currently been identified over a combined 60 metres width and about 340 metres in length.
The company has only conducted four metre composite sampling from Old Town Well at this point, which will eventually be broken down into one metre samples. The best results from the composited samples were 20m grading 0.87grams per tonne gold from 32m, 8m grading 2.17g/t from 24m and 8m at 1.45g/t gold from 36m.
Middle Island has been executing a well planned and substantial phase one drilling program, with a total of 13,400m ploughed into 14 separate prospects and deposits. Deposits that required further drilling to update the mineral resources from JORC 2004 to JORC 2012 include Two Mile Hill, Shillington, Wirraminna, Goat Farm, Twin Shafts and Plum Pudding.
Other prospects that are included in this phase of RC drilling include the Ridge, McIntyre, McClaren, Old Town Well, Wirraminna Laterite - east and west - Davis, Tailings - south and east, G2 and G3 gravity targets
Old Town Well is already on a mining lease and within a stone’s throw of the Sandstone gold processing plant. The deposit looks at this stage to be a low grade, high tonnage oxide prospect, that may just provide some decent fill for the 600,000 tonne per annum mill.
All of these prospects are within an easy four kilometres of the mill and have been prioritised for their potential to yield open pittable resources.
Middle Island said that Old Town Well exhibits geological features that suggest the gold could be associated with oxidised lateritic and saprolitic rocks that may be concentrated in a primary deposit somewhere close by.
The four metre samples from Old Town Well will be split and analysed down to one metre intervals and the company will probably receive the updated results in coming weeks.
Middle Island will shortly kick off phase two of its RC drilling campaign, which it says will now have to be extended because of the successes from phase one.
The plan is to bring any new discoveries into the rapidly advancing resource estimate at the project and subsequently the company's impending prefeasibility study.
Ten RC holes also recently went into the McClaren prospect and came up with an amazing 4m intercept grading nearly three ounces to the tonne gold and another 8m intercept graded 3.35g/t. In another successful program, development drilling at McIntyre included 24m grading 1.66g/t, 23m at 1.40g/t, 11m grading 1.39g/t and 18m grading 1.35g/t.
Given that there are still results outstanding for about 95 RC holes from phase 1, Middle Island should be knee deep in newsflow for a while.
Is your ASX-listed company doing something interesting? Contact : matt.birney@businessnews.com.au
By Matt Birney
