I think those are sound and wise words.
I would add though that I donât think you hire a âlogistics managerâ, a âdata managementâ person, even potentially a COO, until you have a pretty solid and rather imminent (as in NOT ânext yearâ) ramp up production plan. Now perhaps most of these people were just moved over from Auryn Mining and were hired upon earlier production plans and are therefore not indicative of any recent changes. However, if you combine this complete management team with all the statements that have been made since October including Maurizioâs own bio:
Through his efforts AURYN consolidated the Altos de Lipangue mining district, a very promising greenfield project less than 40km from Santiago, Chile, that was fragmented for over 41 years and is now being explored and put into production.
I think it is pretty clear that the intent is a rather imminent start up / ramp up. I guess thatâs just a long winded way of agreeing with your statement: âWith the spring I hope to hear something about their efforts to ramp up production in the upcoming weeks/monthsâ
One of my concerns going into the fall of 2017 was that there was nothing stated earlier in 2017 / 2016 which really indicated a firm conclusion to enter production. There was plenty of early talk about ideas but no clear indication of decision. There had been expressed a clear desire to start production on the Merlin 1 vein and perhaps on the Fortuna claim at surface. But we had no clear update on that throughout 2017. Who knows what they learned since Feb 2017?
But since Oct there have been multiple statements, granted without much detail, expressing a clear intent to start production on the Caren / Merlin 1 and even the Fortuna. So this indicates to me the risk that they may have learned something in 2017 to severely modify their production ideas is no longer a high risk. They still intend to start production even with everything they learned in their 2017 work / analysis. Of course there is always risk of learning something new / unexpected.
So, bottom line, I am confident your hope of hearing something will be fulfilled. Of course there are lots of areas that will be of interest. But everything becomes easier / less risky if we hear those high grade gold discoveries (esp. the bonanza grades) are real and mineable by Auryn for a sufficiently long period to support a big âmassiveâ exploration period.
Along these lines, Aurynâs statement re. the intention of Cerro âbecoming a junior and major mining companyâ is a very bold statement. It has to be taken with several grains of salt until there are details provided in regard to that vision/intent. In the short term mostly I am interested in the details of what they learned in 2017 that could support such an idea (e.g. accessible Caren grades, mining rates, Fortuna grades / tonnes). Weâll see. But I am quite sure we wonât be slipping into a another winter season (itâs already mid-summer there) without having some clarification and more detail on what they intend and believe can happen.
After that comes the evaluation of risk to the execution of whatever plan they put out there. But until the plan / vision is presented ⌠we wait.
