Strickland Metals has continued its rapid-fire consolidation of Western Australia’s east Yandal Belt with a deal that takes its project resource inventory past 600,000 ounces and will see the company well placed to mount the first systematic drilling assault across a 100km-long stretch of the prospective Celia shear zone over the next 12-18 months.
The ASX-listed junior is about to launch a heavyweight drilling campaign in the state’s fertile Yandal-Millrose greenstone terrane after agreeing to pay $10 million to secure the 346,000-ounce Millrose gold project which comes gift wrapped with a 600sq.km land package.
Millrose is about 30km east of ASX gold major Northern Star Resources’ plus-10-million-ounce Jundee operation – the jewel in its tier-one Yandal production base.
The Millrose deal and related $12 million capital raising will see directors including CEO Andrew Bray pump more than $1.6 million into the company. The new capital raise follows on from Strickland’s recent $3.75 million spend to buy Silver Lake Resources’ interest in the Horse Well project and Renegade Exploration’s Yandal project.
Mr Bray says a management and technical overhaul followed by the three acquisitions and circa-$17 million funding injection into Strickland in under three months has created a “significant, emerging Western Australian gold company” with a massive footprint in a blue-chip gold belt and a leadership group determined to see Yandal East step out of the shadows of its well heeled neighbour.
Mr Bray said: “The result of this effort is that the company has consolidated the entirety of the north-eastern flank of the Yandal Greenstone Belt and built up a huge footprint at a tier one address. Of particular excitement for the company is the fact that this part of the belt is significantly underexplored, despite its resource endowment elsewhere and its regional geology.”
Strickland expects to secure an aircore drill rig within six weeks to start up to 100,000m of wide-spaced drilling, commencing in the north around its 108,900-ounce Dusk til Dawn deposit first before working its way south into the Renegade Exploration ground.
It also plans to get a reverse circulation rig into the field early next year to support the aircore program.
The rigs are not likely to take a breather until Christmas 2022, according to the company.
Mr Bray said: “This is the first time that there will be a systematic approach to exploration on this part of the Yandal belt. We’ve got 100,000m of aircore booked in to cover about 80km of the Celia shear. The plan being to use 400m spacings for aircore and as we get assays in we can go back and tighten up areas that look interesting.”
“We’ve got a small RC program starting in a few weeks as well just to test some obvious targets.”
The planned exploration program will put new theories to the test at Dusk til Dawn and probably Horse Well to the south, which has a current resource of nearly 129,000 ounces. Another former Silver Lake joint venture prospect, Big Daddy, further south along the Celia shear, is another obvious follow-up target for Strickland having shown its potential through soil sampling and some aircore drilling to host a large gold system without ever having been RC-drill tested.
Millrose, with its indicated and inferred resource of 6Mt at 1.8 g/t, had a 500,000-ounce-to-1 million ounce “target” put on it by respected geological consulting firm, CSA Global. However, it hasn’t yet had enough follow-up drilling to up the resource. As things stand, Strickland has picked up what is there for sub-A$30/ounce.
It’s the major boost to the company’s contiguous Yandal eastern flank landholding however, that has Bray and his team motivated.
Bray said: “It’s been three months and we started with 150,000 ounces when we (new management group) took over. We bought out Silver Lake to get to 260,000 ounces and picking up Millrose gets us to 600,000oz. So we’re not too far off getting to that magic million-ounce number.”
“But from a strategic point of view it’s not about ticking the million-ounce box, it’s about making that major discovery.”
“We’re sitting on 100km of strike on one of the world’s premier gold belts. We’ve kind of got our hands full with a package like that.”
Bray has managed to pull together a solid team, too, that includes the current managing director of Gateway Mining Mark Cossom who is also the ex-Doray Minerals project manager at Horse Well.
Other notable faces to join Strickland’s push into the Yandal include veteran geologist Tony McClure, Strickland’s chairman, key technical advisor, OMNI GeoX principal Peter Langworthy and project geologist, Richard Pugh, who works with Langworthy at OMNI GeoX.
Mr Bray said: “It’s a great team of people who are all very familiar with each other. It’s a cracking exploration project. And between the previous rights issue and this (latest funding) we’ve demonstrated we can raise money.”
When the dust settles on its latest growth step and fund-raising, Strickland will probably have about $7m at hand to drive its aggressive exploration strategy – money that will no doubt generate a lot of drill dust in the gold-rich Yandal.
Is your ASX-listed company doing something interesting? Contact: matt.birney@businessnews.com.au
By Matt Birney
