Strickland Metals has hit top gear at its monster 7.4-million-ounce gold equivalent Rogozna project in Serbia by mobilising a sixth diamond rig to fuel what the company says is the biggest drilling campaign in the project’s history.
The fresh rig is hard at work at the gold-rich Gradina deposit as part of the company’s effort to deliver a maiden resource at the prospect by the end of the year.
The drill bit will smash out 20,000 new metres of diamond drilling with a particular focus on chasing up a shallow, high-priority up-dip zone towards the surface.
With a comparable haul of drilling metres already racked up, the prospect has revealed a network of high-grade gold seams up to 30m thick, running for more than a kilometre along strike and plunging nearly 900m below surface.
An earlier drilling blitz intersected three separate lodes at site with standout results including an impressive 2m section peaking as high as 17.6 grams per tonne (g/t) gold within a 14.3m hit grading 8g/t gold from 517m.
Other wide hits included 6m running at 4.7g/t gold from 430.7m, a second 6m slice grading 5.7g/t gold from 554.1m and a third intercept of 12m of 3.6g/t gold from 441.1m.
Notably, Strickland also followed one of the mineralised lodes four times up-dip from 603m towards surface. One hit came in at 48.5m grading 3.1g/t gold from 150m.
In what management has called some of the most significant findings at the prospect to date, the shallower high-grade lode appears to flatten out at 40 degrees towards surface and half the angle of deeper hits.
The mineralisation also appears to be tracing its way right to surface along a ridge already flagged by soil sampling for its high gold anomalies.
Should the new drilling confirm this working theory it could be a game-changer for the company’s development plans and lead to the tantalising prospect of opening up the deposit using a cheap and simple horizontal adit starting to the west in lower ground.
The deposit’s mineralisation is marked by intense pyrrhotite alteration, with splashes of pyrite, chalcopyrite, sphalerite and galena. But the real story is the gold, which makes up about 90 per cent of the metal content.
Strickland Metals managing director Paul L’Herpiniere said: “Drilling across the project is progressing well, with two holes completed at Shanac, one hole completed at Gradina and another hole completed at the Red Creek prospect.”
According to the company, with bullion prices riding high and soaring through $5000 per ounce, Gradina’s gold-rich profile could well see it steal the spotlight from the company’s flagship Shanac deposit as the go-to for stage one development.
Strickland last month upgraded its resource at Shanac by 670,000 gold equivalent ounces to 5.3M ounces grading 1.1g/t gold equivalent.
Contributing to the improved numbers at Shanac, contained gold has been boosted by 17 per cent, contained copper is up 38 per cent and zinc stocks increased by 40 per cent.
The resource also includes a higher-grade core of 32Mt for 1.85M gold equivalent ounces running at 1.8g/t, which translates into a 15,000-gold equivalent-ounce resource per vertical metre running 300m in depth.
The company’s global resource now sits at 7.4M ounces, which is an increase of 2M ounces since it took on the project nine months ago. The resource was unearthed at a discovery rate of just $3 per ounce.
In total, Strickland’s armada now includes three rigs drilling at Gradina, two rigs upgrading Shanac and one rig chasing blue-sky potential at Obradov Potok prospect.
With $33.8 million in cash and Northern Star shares banked, Strickland says it’s well-funded to turbocharge its 2025 growth push.
In a market where gold is flying high, the company’s most gold-rich target at Gradina could end up being the ace in Strickland’s Serbian sleeve.
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By James Pearson
