Categories: Base Metals
Topics: General Base Metals

Chakana Copper (TSX-V: PERU)(OTC: CHKKF) CEO David Kelley on New High-Grade Breccia Pipe Discovery at Huancarama West Target in Peru

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the president & CEO of Chakana Copper — Mr. David Kelley. Dave, how are you… a busy day at the conference?

David Kelley: Yeah, I'm doing great, Gerardo! Thank you very much.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, thank you so much for taking the time. You had some important news today. You discovered a second high-grade breccia pipe within Huancarama. You went ahead and released six results from one area to the west and three results from the east — spectacular numbers. The headline reads: 

11 meters of 6.29 grams per tonne (g/t) gold and 92.8 g/t silver, or 7.66 g/t gold equivalent. 

Important to note, that's at 14 meters below surface. I'll let you provide the context to today's results.

David Kelley: Yeah, and thanks for that, Gerardo. They are really good results. I mean, it's important to point out that that interval was part of a longer interval. And these are just shallow scout drilling holes, right? As we've talked before, we're trying to just test the target. And in this case, the target was actually 50 meters to the south. 

It was the H5 breccia. And we thought we would be in wall rock for the majority of that; maybe because it's an angle hole, maybe as much as 60 or 70 meters, and then we might get into breccia. And to our surprise, we got into breccia within three meters of the surface.

It's completely covered. It's a completely blind breccia and we saw great grades in that initial drilling; multi-gram gold and up to hundreds of grams of silver. No copper. And that's not too surprising because the breccia is oxidized, and we often see that the copper is removed. We did have some copper in a couple of the intercepts so we know it's there. 

And as we've seen at Huancarama East, as you go deeper, you get into really, really strongly dominant copper mineralization. So we fully expect that that'll happen at Huancarama West as well as we continue drilling.

Gerardo Del Real: Let me read some more of the highlights from Huancarama West. You had an intercept of 42 meters of 1.24 g/t gold equivalent. You had a 55 meter intercept; 55.4 meters of 2.65 g/t gold equivalent, including 25 meters of 4.57 g/t gold equivalent. I could go on and on, but again, excellent, excellent numbers. 

Hole 173 had 107 meters of 0.78 g/t gold equivalent; that's from Huancarama West. Over at Huancarama East, you had an intercept of 30.85 meters of 2.7 g/t gold equivalent. Congrats! I mean, I say it every time. Every time we chat, it seems like I'm congratulating you. But again, the results speak for themselves. 

Can you give us an update on the drilling program as it stands now? And how is the resource estimate coming along?

David Kelley: Yeah, the drilling is going really well. We've got two rigs running on the property. So we're getting about 3,000 - 3,400 meters of production a month. So it's ramping up. We've got this 26,000 meter drill program that's fully funded that's in progress. We've now released about 3,000 meters of that. So we’ve still got a lot of news to come out. 

We're doing a lot of infill drilling now on that Huancarama East discovery and the Paloma East discovery. We'll be moving over shortly, doing some infill drilling at Paloma West. We're going to put some scout drill holes in at H7 too, because, as you remember, that was a discovery we announced back in 2019 but it only had four drill holes in it. So we need to get some scout holes in up there. 

And that'll be good timing because while we're drilling up there, we can be waiting on results coming back from some of the infill drilling. And that just allows us to be a little bit more precise with planning additional infill drilling. So it's going to be really dynamic going on.

On the resource estimate, we've got interviews happening at the end of this week and early next week with several firms that we've highlighted as potential candidates for the contract to do the resource estimate. So that's a really exciting step for me to go through that selection process and get a contract in place and get the work started because, as you know, several of the breccia pipes we've already drilled out. 

So there's no reason why we can't get those started and get them working on that and updated as new information comes in. Our goal is to get that resource estimate out in Q3 of this year — most likely targeting the October timeframe.

Gerardo Del Real: Excellent! Well, listen, Dave, great work! I'll let you get back to it…  look forward to chatting soon. Plenty of news flow and plenty to talk about it sounds like.

David Kelley: That's great! Thank you so much, Gerardo.

Gerardo Del Real: Thank you.