Categories: Base Metals / Precious Metals
Topics: General Base Metals / General Precious Metals

Doré Copper (TSX-V: DCMC) CEO Ernest Mast on Drilling at the Corner Bay, Cedar Bay & Joe Mann Deposits: “Blessed with a Number of Deposits that are Open and High Grade”

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the President and CEO of Doré Copper (TSX-V: DCMC), Mr. Ernest Mast. Ernie, how are you this morning?

Ernest Mast: I am great, Gerardo. How are you?

Gerardo Del Real: I am excellent. I joked off-air that it's hitting high-grade gold and copper here, there and, it appears, everywhere. You've had a busy week. You announced results a few days ago from the Cedar Bay Central vein. You intersected 6.92% copper and 3.1 grams per tonne gold, add in 24.2 grams per tonne silver, over 3.4 meters. Can you provide some context? It's an ongoing program, but pretty impressive numbers.

Ernest Mast: That's correct. That intercept on the Central vein follows up an intercept of 14.2% copper, 1.16 grams per tonne gold that we had announced earlier this year. This hole also connects us with a historic hole that was approximately 3% copper and 15 grams per tonne gold. It looks like that Central vein is really filling in nicely and we're going to be able to add pretty significant tonnes of high grade in that vein. 

Now, at Cedar Bay we have a series of veins. We also had a good hit on the what's called the 10-20 A vein, where we had an intercept of 1.7 meters at 7.57 grams per tonne gold and 1.65% copper. That's approximately 250 meters downdip from some intercepts from 2018, where we had intercepts in the 15 to 20 grams per tonne gold range and a few percent copper. 

It looks like the Cedar Bay 10-20 A vein and the Cedar Bay Central vein are giving us good results and both of the veins are open downdip and at depth.

Gerardo Del Real: The results are important because, as I mentioned, the drill campaign is ongoing and you're looking to have an updated resource estimate in the first half of 2021. Eventually, I believe the plan is the restart of the camp because you have your 2,700 tonne per day mill. You want to use that as a central processing facility. 

For those that aren't familiar with this story, can you provide some context there and how it all ties together?

Ernest Mast: Correct. We're in the Chibougamau camp, which is approximately 300 miles or 500 kilometers north of Montreal in the province of Quebec. We have a series of past-producing mines and other deposits. We have four deposits that have 43-101 resources on them, Cedar Bay being one of them. The Cedar Bay mine operated up until 1990 and then operations stopped at the 670-meter level. 

Immediately beneath that we know there are historic resources, but we're drilling about at the shaft level, which is about 1,036 meters deep where we have a series of veins. We have the Main vein, the Central vein, the 1020 B and the 1020 A. It looks like we'll be able to grow the resources in that area. Presently, the resources in Central and the 1020s are 360,000 tonnes at 1.92% copper and 8.7 grams per tonne gold. It looks like the gold grade will go down a bit, but definitely the copper grade's going to go up. We're maintaining the high-grade nature. Future work on this deposit would be looking at de-watering the old mine and doing drilling from underground. We'd only do that after we update the resources. 

Now, Cedar Bay's just one of our properties. Another property is the Corner Bay property, which today we announced a couple of more holes to follow up on what we've been doing during 2020. These two holes give us an extension of approximately 125 meters to the south, over 300 meters of downdip or verticality. The two intercepts were very good. 6.3 meters at 3% copper and 0.11 grams per tonne gold. And then 6.45 meters at 4.1% copper and 0.4 grams per tonne gold. These two just add onto the exceptional results we had earlier this year, including a hole of 7 meters at 9.08% copper and 0.4 grams per tonne gold.

The Corner Bay deposit has resources of 3 million tonnes. That will definitely grow when we look to do our resource update early next year. We're definitely not done at Corner Bay because the deposit is open in many directions, including in the direction we just drilled. Then on the other side, on the north side it is also open up plunge. There's some 9% and 6.4% copper intercepts that need to be followed up on. There's also then a deep central lens, which needs to be connected to the main vein lens. It's downdip, and it's never been drilled. There's really a lot more at Corner Bay.

Bigger picture, we're going to tie in together a few of these deposits and look at what's the most economic way for us to get the camp restarted. Right now we're drilling at the Joe Mann property. Joe Mann is a past-producing high-grade gold mine. It produced 1.2 million ounces of gold over its life at an average grade of 8.26 grams per tonne gold. We're drilling in two areas, the West zone and on the Main vein down plunge of high-grade areas. We anticipate to have results from that program later in the year.

Gerardo Del Real: The Corner Bay drilling today is important because it was a step-out hole, correct? You stepped out, I believe, by about 125 meters, which again is important because Corner Bay is supposed to be the main feed to the mill, right?

Ernest Mast: That's correct. All of our feeds are compatible, so there's no issue with commingling the ore. The mineralogy is pretty straight chalcopyrite, no impurities at Corner Bay. The other deposits, which tend to be high-grade gold, we can recover a lot of the gold via gravity recovery and the rest of the gold gets incorporated into the copper concentrate.

All the deposits are important for us and, as you say, as we continue drilling in our program we will have high-grade copper here, high-grade gold there. High-grade both copper and gold in another mine. We're really blessed with a number of deposits that are open, that are high grade. 

We're able to drill all year round. We just did a $3 million Canadian flow-through financing. That will keep us drilling into the beginning of next year. I'd say to continue to look out for these high-grade results, because we'll be putting them out on a consistent basis over the remainder of the year.

Gerardo Del Real: A lot to look forward to. Thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it.

Ernest Mast: My pleasure. Wishing your listeners a safe and productive end to the summer and beginning of the fall.

Gerardo Del Real: Same your way, Ernie. Thank you again.

Ernest Mast: You're welcome.