Homestake Resource
www.homestakeresource.com
www.homestakeresource.com
Homestake Resource Corporation is committed to increasing shareholder value with an experienced management team that has successfully demonstrated the ability to identify, explore and develop gold/silver properties within North America.
The Company’s major asset is the 100% owned 2,585ha Homestake Ridge Project in northwest British Columbia, a gold-rich epithermal/VMS-related vein system which is rapidly advancing with excellent drill results.
Joe Kizis speaks with Harry Norman about Bravo Gold's Homestake Ridge Project
Harry Norman: I'm talking with Joe Kizis, President and Director of Bravo Gold Corporation, listed on the TSX Venture Exchange. Stock ticker BVG, share price 10.5 cents Canadian, market cap 19.65 million dollars Canadian.
Joe, thank you very much for joining us for this interview.
Joe Kizis: My pleasure.
Please give investors a brief introduction to Bravo Gold and what makes the company stand out from the crowd.
Joe Kizis: Yes, we're a junior Canadian exploration and development company. We're listed on the TSX Venture Exchange. We have our major focus as gold, but with a significant emphasis also on silver and base metals. We're part of the Manex Group of companies and we share management, legal, accounting, investor relations, and geologic staff. So we have access to a wide pool of talent.
I'm the President. I'm a geologist with 35 years of experience both with major and junior exploration and mining companies. So that's who we are. Our major asset is Homestake Ridge. So far we've drilled 21 core holes, about 59,000 metres of drilling. And with that, we've identified two deposits. The Main Homestake and the Homestake Silver. And at both deposits we've intersected some pretty spectacular grades.
We expect additional deposits to be found. These types of deposits typically form in clusters and that's in part why we added the new asset to our group, which is the Kinskuch project.
How does British Columbia stack up as a gold exploration and mining destination, Joe?
Joe Kizis: Homestake Ridge and Kinskuch are both part of the well-known belt of rich precious and base metal deposits in Northwestern British Columbia. They're hosted by Jurassic volcanics and sediments called Hazelton Group. In that belt of rocks, there are a number of plus one million ounce deposits of gold and that includes things like Eskay Creek, Silbak Premier and Snip. Eskay Creek is in fact one of the world's richest deposits, and it's produced over three million ounces of gold and nearly 160 million ounces of silver. In addition to that, significant amounts of lead and zinc.
The Homestake Ridge Project covers 2,585 hectares. And on the 1st of April, Bravo Gold took out an option on the adjacent Kinskuch Project, covering 59,600 hectares. Tell us more about the rationale for taking out an option on Kinskuch, the terms of the option, and your plans for Kinskuch.
Joe Kizis: Kinskuch is really the southern extension of the same mineral trends that we see on Homestake Ridge. And so we wanted to use our knowledge that we've gained at Homestake to make additional discoveries at Kinskuch. I recently toured the Kinskuch property and I see many similarities to Homestake.
There are actually two trends of mineralisation. One follows our access road from our camp at Alice Arm, and the other one is parallel and farther east… and it is particularly impressive to me. What's exciting about these is that there has been little or no drilling on many of the mineral showings that are on the Kinskuch property. So we think there's a lot of upside there.
As far as the terms, for 85 percent, which we can earn, we have to make payments of 580,000 dollars and spend three million dollars in work on the project. We have the opportunity to purchase the remaining 15 percent by paying two million dollars and granting a two percent royalty. We can purchase further one percent of that royalty for a million dollars.
We're currently field checking a number of known historic mineral occurrences and we're following up several of those exciting ones with soil sampling. We're also going to do an airborne geophysical survey this year. And so we expect to have some pretty exciting new targets developed later this season.
Bravo Gold has two resources, with somewhat different characteristics, with the main Homestake Ridge deposit and the Homestake silver deposit. Please would you talk us through the Homestake main deposit and Homestake silver deposit.
Joe Kizis: Sure. The deposits are actually quite similar. There's actually more copper at the Main Homestake and more silver at the Homestake Silver deposit. That may be due to erosion at the Main Homestake deposit and the fact that we haven't drilled deep enough on the Homestake Silver to get into the copper zone. But otherwise, they're quite similar and we tend to lump them together because they'd be mined as one operation.
It looks like underground mining will be the most effective way to mine this, so we use a cut-off grade of three grams per tonne as gold equivalent. And we've had an outside independent engineering company calculate a 43-101 compliant resource for us. They come up with two categories. In the inferred category, we have an estimate of 530,000 ounces of gold and 13.47 million ounces of silver.
In addition to that, in the indicated category, there's 191,000 ounces of gold and 1.35 million ounces of silver. In addition, as I mentioned before, the main Homestake deposit does have a significant amount of copper and the resource contains 9.22 million pounds of copper at this time.
What exploration and development work is underway with your Homestake Ridge projects, Joe?
Joe Kizis: Drilling should begin at Homestake right around the end of July. Our first target that we'll be testing is what we call the 215 zone. This is an area where we did some shallow drilling last year and we noted some very strong similarities to the top of the Homestake Silver deposit which is nearby to the southwest. We're hoping that the deeper drilling we do this year will intersect rich mineralisation, just like we did beneath the Homestake Silverrelatively barren cap, so we're excited about that. After we finish those initial holes on the 215 zone, there's an area between the Main Homestake and the Homestake silver deposit where we think there's a shallow band of silver rich mineralisation that would pretty much connect the two deposits. So we'll be doing drilling there next.
At the same time, we're actually cutting lines right now, to do an IP resistivity geophysical survey over the two known deposits. Hopefully that will give us a signature that we can then use when we do additional line on strike. There are a number of areas that are covered by brush and talus because it’s fairly steep country. And of course you can't see through that, so we're hoping that the geophysics will help us see through those areas and develop drill targets that we can test later in this season.
So that covers the exploration side of things. As far as the engineering side of things, we've hired a mining engineer earlier this year and he's overseeing a number of scoping studies that are underway right now from contractors. We're looking at different types of options for power, different configurations for mining, metallurgical characteristics, etc.
So that work is underway and of course the idea there is to develop enough information to eventually bring it through a pre-feasibility study.
What is the situation with First Nations, the environment and infrastructure at Homestake Ridge and Kinskuch?
Joe Kizis: All the targets that we're interested in are on the Niska land and we have very good relations with them. We hire many Niska locals for our on-site work. As far as the environment, it is difficult terrain. There's quite a bit of snow, so those would be the difficulties that we have to deal with. On the other side of the ledger though, we have very good infrastructure for Northern BC. We're no more than 30 kilometres from paved roads, power, and deep water access to the Pacific Ocean. So when you're thinking about shipping out concentrates, those are some pretty important factors.
Right now there's a gravel road that leads from our camp at Alice Arm to within about six kilometres of the Homestake property and then from that point we helicopter into the property.
On June the 14th, Bravo Gold closed at the first tranche of a flow-through private placement for gross proceeds of three million dollars US. Where does this leave Bravo Gold's financial situation going forward, Joe?
Joe Kizis: At this time, we have about five million dollars in the bank and we're fully funded for our 2011 field programme. We're working on the next tranche.
What can investors expect from Bravo Gold over the next 12 to 18 months?
Joe Kizis: The programme will have included up to five thousand metres of core drilling at Homestake and about two thousand metres at Kinskuch. Also we're continuing the engineering and metallurgical studies, ground and airborne geophysics and follow-up mapping and sampling. Of goal, of course, is to find one or more new deposits in this district and to conduct enough engineering work to begin pre-feasibility studies. So I think investors can expect a good news flow and hopefully we're going to be rewarding them with new deposits this year.
