They should be out of ways to not find the DL this quarter unless something is significantly and unexpectedly wrong. They are only a few meters below the known existing works so it is very unlikely the nature of the DL could change that much over such a short distance. So it seems very likely they will find their way and get their chimney built this Q.
MC then gets paid. He has quite a lot invested here by this time and with the professional help he is raising the stakes by ‘loaning’ more. But as stated before, there is almost certainly enough high grade hot spot ore to make sure MC gets his money back. So that is fairly low risk for him.
But the variation in those grades even across very short distances, which mirrors what was seen in the high grade areas of the Caren, raises the uncertainty as to what the average grade of this vein will turn out to be. The fact that in the old workings they had a fairly small area that averaged 60+ gpt raises an eyebrow to be sure. But it is very short of proof that this kind of grade will hold up across hundreds of meters of vein. Maybe you average 64 gpt all the way down 500 meters and out 1 km+. And if so, it’s bonanza super lottery winner time. But that’s a big assumption. You could just as well have occasional pockets of 10m or 20m or 30m where you can hold that average and then another 30m, 40m, or 50m where you average very marginal grades.
Everything will end up depending upon average ore grade and width of the vein across longer distances of say hundreds of meters. And we just won’t know until they start exploitation. But it looks like we’ll find out this next Chilean summer as the exploitation begins. And if they start publishing news of regular truck loads of even 20+ gpt ore at multiple levels for a couple of quarters and we see some AISC information that looks decent, then our ship is coming in. If on the other hand, grades fall much below 10 gpt, then things are going to get pretty tough for the whole self-funding and expanding operations approach.
So this implies that after over 20 years of waiting, we should know a lot about where we stand in about a year.