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

Sterling Metals (TSX-V: SAG)(OTCQB: SAGGF) CEO Mathew Wilson on Drilling at Adeline District Scale Copper District

 

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the CEO of Sterling Metals, Mr. Matthew Wilson. Mat, great to have you back on. I know you have to be excited with the news. You just commenced your diamond drilling program at your Adeline project in Labrador. Congrats on that front. How are you?

Mat Wilson: I'm great. Thanks a lot for having me. Always really fun to chat with you. I'm very good. We are drilling, so I'm very good.

Gerardo Del Real: Well listen, let's get right into it. There's two types of companies out there right now, and I've said this many times in recent conversations, publicly and privately. There's companies that are waiting for a better market and there's companies like Sterling that have been using the softness in the market to really buffer up and refine the drill targets, advance a lot of the studies that go into delineating quality targets. And you've been doing exactly that for the last several months. The other type of company is the company that actually is just getting to it. You're getting to it, you've been at it. Tell me about the targets and tell me why you're so excited about the program.

Mat Wilson: Yeah, I think it's a unique situation as generally when you acquire a new asset, which we did, we acquired the satellite project in March. Usually the more work you do on it gets a little bit worse, right? Because you start seeing, well, it's not so good on surface. Well, the historical results aren't quite there, but this is actually one of those rare cases where it's quite the opposite. This is much better now than it was when we raised the six and a half million in April, which is a great thing because we have the money to kind of push it forward. So we're really excited about this. Everything that we see on surface is lining up with what our expectations were, if not much better. And we were able to build a camp that's basically ready to go that we're using for the drill program and then also with a few small tweaks would be good for the winter.

So the guys did an amazing job, built a camp in 30 days in the middle of nowhere, essentially in Labrador so that we can get drilling. And now we're about a couple of days into the drill program now. So really exciting time pushing forward on this project, which is this 44 kilometer sediment hosted copper basin. And it's nice to see the market is starting to see what the size of these things can be, the success of the big push with Aston Bay and America West up in Nunavut. And even smaller things like Decatur and BC you're starting to see people react to sediment-hosted copper. And I think that our project will hopefully stand up strong to all of those things.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, let me give some context for people that may be new to the Sterling story. One of the things that I really like when I'm allocating capital in an earlier stage explorer, even if the project is a bit more advanced, as is the case here, is the potential for scale. Because if you can make one discovery and you have scale, then the chances are you're going to be onto multiple discoveries. And you mentioned the fact that this is a 44 kilometer by seven kilometer basin that is a hundred percent owned by Sterling. I hate to overstate the importance of that, but if you make one discovery, it's game on, right?

Mat Wilson: It definitely is, and I think that we're fine-tuning the drilling program as it goes, but we definitely are drilling two targets this program and they are 40 kilometers apart or 35 or something like that. And the one we're drilling right now has the historical hole, eight meters of almost 2% copper and 60 gram silver. And the one 40 kilometers away, there's a 60-meter-long trench at surface that's almost eight meters wide that carries one and a quarter percent copper and there's just bornite and calcite everywhere on surface. And so you're just seeing the extent and the size here.

And so hopefully after this program people will start to see that a little bit more, that there's just multiple deposits within this basin. And one of the great things about sediment hosted basins is that lateral extent of them that makes them so special because they go for so long and the continuity of grade is generally very consistent. So if you see grade on one side, you're going to see the grade on the other side. It's really just finding where you get the best areas to mine, where the beds get the widest, or in our case where we're hopefully going to find some of these blowout zones, but the grades should stay relatively consistent throughout. So the fact that we have these two targets so far apart and many of the targets in the middle already, for being so early stage, is a great sign.

Gerardo Del Real: As far as turnaround times with the lab goes, how is that coming along? What are you expecting there?

Mat Wilson: We're working on a couple different contingencies. Ideally though, we're looking at, we're getting told four to six weeks for regular turnaround rush assays, two weeks. Possible we're just looking at the best city to send the core right now just to make sure it's the fastest. I think we're going to avoid boats, stay on a train, might go right to Montreal, actually in this case from Goose Bay. So realistically it's safe to say October, but you never know. It could be sooner. It could be the end of October, it could be the beginning of October. We could be even sooner than that.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, we know everybody gets back in the office here in the next week to week and a half. I'm looking forward to the increasing activity. Congrats again for staying busy and positioning shareholders to hopefully reap the rewards of what looks like could be a pretty significant district scale copper play.

Mat Wilson: Thanks a lot, Gerardo. I'm pretty pumped to share the results. Hopefully they turn out as well as they are in surface and we can kind of get something going here in Canada. Big new copper play.

Gerardo Del Real: Excellent. Looking forward to having you back on.

Mat Wilson: Thanks very much. Look forward to being here.

Gerardo Del Real: Cheers.