Avrupa Minerals (TSX-V: AVU)(OTC: AVPMF) CEO Paul Kuhn on Multiple Shots on Goal for Major Discovery in 2022

Paul Kuhn: Hi, Gerardo. Thanks. I'm doing good. Good. And you're doing good as well I presume?

Paul Kuhn: That sounds good, Gerardo. We are excited about the program. I's our first new foray into a different part of the world than we've been used to. We spent quite a bit of time to pick a good project package with a good science background with the company that we are purchasing. And three of the projects are actually in a VMS belt that's similar to what we're working in in Portugal, only a billion and a half years older. Used to be the same rocks, but they're different rocks now, but the mineralization is there. It's a district that's seen quite a bit of mining over the past 100 years. Recently, First Quantum stopped mining at the Pyhasalmi Mine itself. It ran out of ore, but they have a flotation plant nearby, which is looking for feed.

We're in the Pyhasalmi VMS District. We have two reservations now, and one exploration license application. And that's the one I want to talk about is the Kolima Reservation turned exploration permit application. So what we've got there is a lot of old work. The finished geological survey did a lot of... Well, they discovered the area in the early mid-50's, and they did a lot of work subsequently up into the early '80s. They drilled 70 holes in the area that we’re most interested in. They did geophysical work. They did geological mapping. They did some sampling, but nothing like we would do today. And that's where our opportunity is for starters. We've acquired the data and the logs for all those 70 holes from the geological survey of Finland. And we quite quickly realized that there was a lot of mineralization, mostly Sphalerite, Zinc mineralization, Zinc Sulfide in the core that was never sampled and never really described.

And what we see is enough sulfides to make a guess that we're looking at the distal part of a massive sulfide system. That's our optimism. The Sphalerite, the Zinc mineralization is disseminated over long intervals. One of the drill holes we're resampling may have an interval of about 100 meters of this low grade Zinc mineralization. And when I say low grade, I'm expecting somewhere in the area of 1% over significant thicknesses. But there's also a few layers here and there, one or two meters thick, where previous work has sampled the Zinc mineralization and they've gotten some good anomalism, five, 6% over a meter or two in a number of places.

So what we're doing is we've taken four of those holes where we have all this information, and we've taken it down to the geological survey of Finland's core shed in the city of Rovaniemi, Central Finland and we're relogging the core. And at the same time, we're doing magnetics on it. And we're doing XRF sampling, hand sampling with X-ray diffraction machine, and we're selecting continuous samples along the core and sending those rock samples, the core samples to ALS Laboratory. It'll end up in Ireland. For the most part, what we're doing is we're taking 250 samples and sending them out to a lab to have them credibly analyzed with a credible lab. And then we'll see what happens after that.

We think that there'll be some nice anomalism. Our goal is to find some sort of vector towards the proximal mineralization, which would be the massive sulfide mineralization in the system itself. We're looking to see how we think about the strength of this mineralization. We want to get a better idea of that. And we're looking to see whether these holes that we've selected indicate that there's strike length extension. The area we're working at is about 2,000 meters long. We've selected these four samples over 1,000 or 1,500 meters strike length. And our targeting goes for another two or three kilometers to the south of that. We're looking at a pretty nice long target with some width, and already some mineralization that hasn't been really described in 40 years.

Paul Kuhn: Yes. Given the way the labs are working these days, they're pretty busy. I'm thinking it'll take a month anyway to get our results back, and probably a little bit more. Let's say four to six weeks.

Paul Kuhn: Well, we're going to continue in Finland for the time being. We have three of these VMS target reservations in Finland in the same general area. And so as we wind down this core logging and sampling program, we will move to the next property, which is called Kangasjärvi. And on this property, we already have a small resource. There's an old mine on the property. I guess they mined it in the '70s or the '80s. I don't remember, sorry. But it was a while ago. And it was probably done by Outokumpu and they left it there. The initial resource was 300,000 tonnes of 5 or 6% zinc. And we're finding, because we purchased the data for a lot of historic drilling in that area, we’re finding that there's mineralization in holes that are along strike, several hundred meters to a kilometer away from the actual mineralization itself.

So we're planning to start working on that. We've already done a deep penetrating electromagnetic survey on the previous property, Kolima and this one Kangasjarvi, and on the third property, which is called Pielavesi. We're not going to get to that one right away, but later in the summer. Yes. But the next shot is actually another one in Finland. So we've got mineralization on it. We've got a lot of data already, and we're going to hit that one pretty hard too. After we get this Finland stuff going like we are now, we'll probably go back to drilling in Portugal.

Our partner has verbally told me that they expect to restart drilling at Sesmarias in June. And we expect they're going to be on time or close to on time for that, maybe the end of June. But in any case, they're keen on moving forward according to their geologists. And we're looking forward to doing that. The last thing I'm really dragging this for you. The last one I'm excited about is we may get our Slivovo gold license back in Kosovo. We've been working on it for a year and a half to get it back. And we have rumors that the mining bureau is going to make their decision on whether to issue it or not in the next few weeks. So, lots of stuff going on this summer for Avrupa.

Paul Kuhn: We're looking forward to it.

Paul Kuhn: Absolutely.

Paul Kuhn: Thank you, Gerardo. Nice talking with you. Catch you later.

Paul Kuhn: See you soon. Yep. Bye-bye.