Read on for the conclusion of the first conversation between The Unknown Geologist and Mr. Bob Moriarty. Find the first part of the transcript here on Anaconda Mining’s (TSX:ANX) Goldboro project. This special conversation happened all the way back in August 24, 2017. Each day since then has felt like a month as I’ve waited for someone to do something at Goldboro – I can hardly imagine how The Unknown Geologist has felt following the project for 40 years!
Unknown Geologist: I remember Dustin asking me to highlight some key points about Goldboro. Like how many ounces of gold do we think Goldboro will host? I said to him…you've got 850,000 now, when all is said and done, Goldboro will have at least 2,000,000 ounces. I said, look at it this way, the deepest hole ever drilled in Goldboro was about 400 meters deep. Dolliver Mountain, which once hosted the largest stamp mill in the province, is 1.5 kilometers out to the west of the main ramp area. At the main ramp area, all the Dolliver Mountain material is below your feet about a kilometer or so. The property has never been drilled deeper than 300-400 meters. If I remember correctly, the max depth for most holes in Goldboro was 200-250 vertical meters. That is very common amongst all the gold properties in Nova Scotia. They didn’t have to drill deep in Goldboro because everything comes to surface. And that gives you a many, very high-grade smaller open pit targets to choose from.
Another key point I mentioned to Dustin was about the high-grade nuggety gold that Goldboro hosts. Jacques Levesque, the former CEO of Orex, had a promotional piece of Goldboro drill core that was about 35 centimeters in length that was glued back together. Bruce Mitchell, who is working with Anaconda now, was an Orex geologist at the time and we were working together at Goldboro. We were logging some HQ core. Bruce logged that 35-centimeter piece of quartz as 1% gold. Nuggets a big as your thumbnail are visible in the core as well as many, many other smaller nuggets. The core was never analyzed or included in any resources at Goldboro. We took the core sample to Paul Smith at Department of Natural Resources in Halifax. Paul said it was probably the best drill core he's ever seen. We asked him how many grams per tonne he thought it might have and his guess was over 10,000 g/t.
Bob Moriarty: Wow.
Unknown Geologist: That quartz vein was intersected at 28 meters deep. Why not chase that one to surface? If you find anything that’s in the hundreds and/or thousands of grams-per-tonne then you're probably into a high-grade ore chute. Those are the targets Anaconda needs to focus on. Infill drill around those intercepts and it should be simple. The resources they have today will be much higher as the infill drilling proves the continuity of the high-grade gold.
Peter Bell: If I can interject my opinion, briefly. I first met Anaconda back in November 2016. Dustin was at the Metals Investor Forum as an attendee with a copy of his corporate presentation and I met him at Don Moore's booth. Long story short, from when I first heard the story of Anaconda back in November 2016 it was a compelling story and there was no mention of Goldboro. There was a five-year period there where they didn't do any equity financings from 2011 through 2016, so the street doesn't care about their stock but they are a mean little producer.
Unknown Geologist: Right. Producing 16,000+ ounces a year can be self-sustaining but doesn't garner much market attention. When they picked up Goldboro, they went from 1.6 grams per tonne in their pit to much more. The PEA tentatively says over 5 grams per tonne.
Dustin has said it would cost around $20/tonne to barge it to the mill, which is probably in the ballpark because they have empty barges coming back from South Carolina after selling their waste rock. It's only a short little trip into Goldboro with an empty boat. The economics of that alone were enough to make me shake my head. At Forest Hill, they trucked ore 150 miles, which cost 20 bucks a tonne back in the mid 1980’s!
Peter Bell: And let me point out that Dustin was talking about all this back in November 2016 before Goldboro was even part of the company! He was talking about potential to ship ore back from Viking and Thor, whether to build a concentrator out there or transport raw ore.
Bob Moriarty: You guys are a lot more familiar with them than I am, at this point. How far is the mill from Goldboro?
Unknown Geologist: Their mill is in Baie Verte, Newfoundland. It’s northwestern Newfoundland, basically.
Bob Moriarty: Then, that's screaming for at least a gravity circuit in Nova Scotia. When you've got those kind of grades, you could handcob and FedEx it!
Unknown Geologist: That's the best one I've heard all day, Bob. That's good. Canada Post would be a bit cheaper though. I have talked to a few people who know the project well enough and some have said they could probably get 75% of their gold from Goldboro off the table. Some have said you could take it across the table first and then leach it.
Anaconda is working on a PEA now and it will consider whether to barge it directly or concentrate it and ship the concentrate to the mill. There are a lot of options that are being considered.
Bob Moriarty: You could not heap leach this – it is too high-grade. The simplest thing would be to establish cash flow with a gravity circuit and then use that to fund a cyanide mill.
If they have the bandwidth, then they have to move this thing forward. They have 800,000 ounces of high-grade, economic gold in one of the best jurisdictions in the world and they're getting 20 bucks an ounce? If you're wrong at anything, then you're wrong on the two million ounces – it's probably a lot more than two million ounces.
Unknown Geologist: I don't like to blow things out of proportion. I just talk about the science and what I see. I see how noncontiguous the high-grade is in the resource models. I know how they drilled Goldboro in the past, primarily looking for a high-tonnage low-grade open pit mine which we know is not there thanks to Osisko’s efforts with Orex. If Anaconda focus on the high-grade intersections they know and correctly infill drill this property, the high-grade model will present a very attractive resource. I am very confident of that, otherwise I would not be talking to you today.
Bob Moriarty: This is not even complicated for a company that has cash flow and the people who could do this. They even have a mill, even if it's located on the wrong island! This is simple – I could spot drill holes there!
Unknown Geologist: You could, Bob.
What I am trying to do with these guys is very basic at this point. The most glorious thing about this whole thing is it that all the high-grade comes to surface. Most mines have one blob that hits surface somewhere, which is how they found it. Then, exploration goes in and drills it off for an underground or pit scenario. The luxury at Goldboro is that it all plunges to the east at 25 degrees and it comes to surface somewhere.
The slopes of the anticline are 72 degrees, which are perfect for stope mining. The host rock is structurally solid. There are not many major faults and, even when you go through them, the rock is very solid. I've seen it before at Forest Hill and underground at Caribou – very solid rock that is easy to work with throughout the mine.
I don't understand how nobody's ever seriously mined Goldboro before (other than the Boston Richardson at the turn of the century). Especially compared to what I've seen mined at other locations in Nova Scotia! That's why I'm here today – to beat the drum a bit louder with your help.
Bob Moriarty: How old are you?
Unknown Geologist: I'm 54. I was a young fellow when I went there, but I had five years of experience looking around at the Nova Scotia gold fields.
Bob Moriarty: That's the problem. I'm 70. As you get older, you realize that people are dumber than bricks. I have read about these saddle reef deposits and there are many different layers of mineralization. All you can do is poke through them. Some of those grades are $20,000 ore. When they send you the sheet of paper back from the assay lab for that, they have a red stamp at the top that says, "Mine me! Mine me!"
Unknown Geologist: Exactly right. When we drill this and you look at the core, you can see the thicknesses of these things. They are wide. The Boston Richardson belt was 8.5 meters thick in the ore chute on one limb of the anticline. It is continuous and doesn't peter out quickly.
It's just trying to get people to listen. I reached out to Orex and worked with them. Now I'm talking to Anaconda.
Bob Moriarty: Great. I don't care who it is, but one guy needs to wake up and realize what they've got. This is so simple it's obscene. If they want my support, then they simply have to convince me that they are going to move this thing forward! If they don't convince me they’re going to move it forward, then I'm going to write about the dumbest mining company in Canada. And if they are moving it forward, then I'm going to write about the smartest mining company in Canada. I don't care which they do.
Unknown Geologist: I'll sign either one of those, Bob. Let me tell ya.
Bob Moriarty: I feel bad if you're trying to convince me of something. I have a pet monkey who could understand this story.
Unknown Geologist: LOL…Absolutely. It's a hidden jewel. I call it The Beast. It's a beast in comparison to anything I've seen in the province. I've seen quite a lot of these other operations. Atlantic Gold is coming in with an open pit deposit now, which is argillite and some quartz. Fair enough, but our argillite also carries significant grade! I have a piece of argillite, which is basically black slate, that has visible gold in it. It's upstairs in my mineral collection.
Bob Moriarty: Sorry -- can you give me your address? I’d like to drop by at two in the morning.
Unknown Geologist: Sure. I'll get up any time of the day to talk about Goldboro gold.
Bob Moriarty: No, I don't want you to be up. I want you to be asleep when I sneak in.
Unknown Geologist: Well…
Bob Moriarty: Let me talk about the dumbest mining company in Canadian history. You may be familiar with it. Do you know where the Nugget Pond mine is?
Unknown Geologist: Yes.
Bob Moriarty: If you go to the British Museum, then you will see four pieces of fossil gold that were found in Devon next to Cornwall in England. If you look at those from Nugget Pond, it is identical to the gold found in Devon – it looks just like a fern that was created 60 or 50 million years ago. When specimens have gone on sale at auction, they sell for $50,000 a piece for a piece of gold you can hold in your hand. I read in 2000 that the miners at Richmont were stealing the ore by throwing it over the fence. They were coming back at night on snowmobiles and were selling it on Ebay. If you look at their financial reports, the grade of the deposit kept going down. Each quarter, for nine quarters, the grade went down but nobody noticed anything.
Somebody called up one day and talked to Jean-Guy Rivard, who was President of the company and said I want to buy some of that Nugget Pond gold. He said, "We don't sell it." And the guy said, "Yes, you do." Jean-Guy Rivard said "No, we don't." And the guy said "Yes, you do. I bought some on Ebay!" Jean-Guy Rivard goes on Ebay and he looks, and sure enough, there's 5 or 10 specimens of Nugget Pond gold. The RCMP go to Ebay, find out who was selling the gold, and they seized 2,000 kilos.
Unknown Geologist: Holy cow. Kilos?
Bob Moriarty: Kilos. One of the samples was 24 inches wide and weighed 35 pounds.
Unknown Geologist: How did they get that over the fence?
Bob Moriarty: Carefully. Very carefully.
I talked to Jean-Guy Rivard and told him: "I'm not sure if you're familiar with Goldcorp but they just had that Goldcorp challenge to find the next five million ounces of gold at the Goldcorp Mine and the prize was $500,000 – they weren't trying to find five million ounces of gold, they were trying promote the company and it absolutely worked because the value of the stock went up! I want to do a similar deal with you. I will buy the gold from you and sell it for you to collectors." He said I must be part of the group stealing the gold! I said, "what makes you think that? I run a newsletter – read about it, it's on Stock Watch. It's not a secret! You've got something that's especially valuable here." He didn’t listen – he took every specimen and threw it in the crusher.
Unknown Geologist: Wow. He could have gotten five times the value of the weight of gold with some of these specimens or more.
Bob Moriarty: If there's anybody dumber than that in the Universe then I'd like to know who it is.
There's a book, you’d have to go to a specialized mining library to find it, that is called "Minerals of Cornwall and Devon" that shows the pieces that are in the British Museum. They are absolutely magnificent. They've taken vinegar and leached the calcite to expose this stunning fern made of 24 carat gold. When Richmont left, they left a lot of gold in that mine. I don't know who owns it now, but there's probably still some spectacular gold there.
Unknown Geologist: Anaconda has property around that deposit, in fact, I was just reviewing that information the other day. They have some pretty interesting prospects, which aren’t getting any market attention. They're bringing some of them online, like Argyle.
And don't forget that Anaconda are working on a research project to adapt some existing technology to economically mine single vein deposits!
Find more on Bob Moriarty online at http://321gold.com/
Please note that The Unknown Geologist, Mr. David Hatchette is affiliated with the company. This document contains statements that are forward looking statements and are subject to various risks and uncertainties concerning the specific factors disclosed under the heading “Risk Factors” and elsewhere in the Company’s periodic filings with Canadian securities regulators. Such information contained herein represents management’s best judgment as of the date hereof based on information currently available. The Company does not assume the obligation to update any forward-looking statement.
