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Anacortes Mining (TSX-V: XYZ)(OTCQB: XYZFF) CEO Jim Currie on Receiving Final Approval for Drilling Program at Tres Cruces
Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the CEO of Anacortes Mining, Mr. Jim Currie. Jim, how are you today? It's great to pronounce my name accurately. And you're one of the few that can do that. So I figured I'd lead with that. How are you doing, sir?
Jim Currie: I'm well. Thanks, Gerardo. Nice speaking to you as always.
Gerardo Del Real: Listen, it's obviously interesting times, interesting markets. There is clearly, clearly a sector rotation in the overall indices that I think in the midterm is actually going to be very favorable for precious metals and the better companies in the space. Right now, everything is getting hit. I think it presents a heck of an opportunity. My bread and butter is the resource space. There are bargains everywhere, including Anacortes. You just checked off a big, big milestone. You received final approval for the drilling program, and you begun the mobilization to the site at the Tres Cruces gold project. Congratulations. That's a milestone for the company. It's a long time coming and I for one cannot wait to see what the drill turns up. You've called Tres Cruces the gold exploration story of 2022. We're going to see here soon. I'll let you provide a little bit of the context and the details there, Jim.
Jim Currie: Okay. Well, thanks for that. Yeah. It took a long time to get the drill permit, but the Peruvian mining legislation is one of the better legislations on the planet. They're very careful about what they allow you to do, and we don't have a problem with that. And of course, with the left-wing Castillo government in there right now, they're being very careful about making sure that all the boxes are properly checked, including consultation with the local communities. So we did that per their legislation and took a little bit longer than we would've liked, but we're here now. We've got the drill permit, and we're actually building drill pads today and hope to be drilling by Monday or Tuesday.
So what we're going to be doing here is really a three-pronged approach. We're going to be doing some infill drilling to support our feasibility study, which will come on the heels of a very robust, preliminary economic assessment that we did earlier this year that showed a very robust oxide project that we're now taking to feasibility. We're going to get some metallurgical core for further testing on that to test the excellent gold recoveries we've seen from the oxide, which were up in the 82% range. But obviously we want to get some more information so that when we go into feasibility study, we've overlooked nothing. And then of course, then the real exciting part of it is we're going to drill some deep holes to go into some of the holes that Barrick terminated years ago when they were still in mineralization.
And you ask yourself, "Well, why did they do that?" Well, the reason they did that was because Barrick was just looking for oxide resources to supplement their nearby Lagunas Norte heap leach mine, which only treated oxides. And they felt that anything in the sulfide part of the ore body, they could re-drill at a later date. So they terminated these holes in very, very strong gold and silver mineralization. And one of them was hole number 255, which I refer to in a lot of our correspondence and on our website and in our press releases. Well, that hole had 228 meters of almost three grams per tonne. And so just to put it into imperial units, that's 750 feet of a 10th of an ounce per tonne. That's very, very attractive rock.
And you compare that to other discoveries over the course of time, well, the discovery hole at Barrick's Goldstrike mine was only 600 feet. It was nine grams per tonne or three tenths of an ounce of gold. But you got to remember that was back in 1986, when gold was $300 an ounce. So the value of that hole in the current dollars is actually more than the Goldstrike discovery hole. Yeah. We're really, really excited to be drilling some of these deep holes.
Gerardo Del Real: That hole, 255 was absolutely spectacular. I mentioned the volatility in the market. I mentioned the exciting second half. I think it's really, really important to point out that if you, as a company have a strong balance sheet, the volatility right now to the downside, isn't fun to see, but it doesn't really affect the day to day operations. You've mobilized the rigs. You're starting to drill here soon. We're going to start getting results here over the next several months. How's the balance sheet looking?
Jim Currie: I mean, I can only comment to what we've publicly disclosed. And at the end of last year we had $13 million Canadian, but our burn rate has been very low. We've probably only burned about a million since then, just because we run a pretty tight ship here. Yeah. We've still got a lot of money in the till and certainly enough to get through all of our activities this year and into next year. We look at our share price and think, "Well, you know what? It's come off, but so is everybody else." And we also look at it and say, "Now what we have is we have a bunch of shareholders now that actually believe in what we're doing."
And the sell-off here in recent months have been people that have made a bit of money from buying the stock at lower prices and offloading their stock in this current distress market. And we're all set to go. We're well financed. We've got a tiger by the tail. And as I've said many, many times, this is going to be the gold exploration study of 2022. Some of the results that we're going to pull from this, I truly believe are going to be spectacular. And one of the things I never mentioned about that hole 255, they had a two meter intercept within that intercept that I discussed that actually was two meters or seven feet of almost three ounces per tonne. So there's opportunity within the larger rock mass there for some really, really high grade hits. So it's going to be exciting.
Gerardo Del Real: It's called buy low and sell high, people. You can't sell high if you don't buy low. I suspect we're getting close to the lows in a lot of names, including Anacortes. Jim, always an absolute pleasure. Thanks for coming on. Looking forward to chatting soon.
Jim Currie: Absolutely, Gerardo. And to your investors out there, stay tuned folks. The best is yet to come.
Gerardo Del Real: Looking forward to it. Thanks again, Jim.
Jim Currie: Okay. Thanks, Gerardo. Cheers.