Navarre Minerals begins high-impact drilling across historic St Arnaud goldfield
Navarre managing director Ian Holland says the company has a “good chance” of a significant gold discovery at St Arnaud.
Navarre Minerals (ASX: NML) has begun a high-impact drilling program at its St Arnaud gold project in Victoria with two diamond rigs now operating on site to generate a maiden resource.
The 4,000m program is targeting the Nelson Line within the project, which accounted for the 80% of the 400,000 ounces of gold produced historically.
Resource potential will be tested beneath and adjacent to the old Comstock open pit which was mined late last century.
The program will also test other targets where recent aircore drilling returned high-grade gold.
Navarre managing director Ian Holland said it was an “exciting time” for the company at St Arnaud.
“Historically, the mining area is known for high-grade gold and silver mineralisation and the potential for deposits of significant scale.”
“Our assessment to-date is based on the presence of strong gold mineralisation left at the base of the old Comstock open pit.”
“Coupled with our recent aircore drilling results, this gives us a good chance of making a significant mineral discovery,” Mr Holland added.
Recent high-grade gold and silver results
Previous aircore drilling across the Nelson line uncovered high-grade gold and silver with assays revealed in June.
Better results were 1m at 36.4 grams per tonne gold from 41m; 6m at 1.2g/t gold and 67g/t silver from 20m, including 2m at 2.5g/t gold and 172g/t silver; and 1m at 5.7g/t gold and 34.8g/t silver from surface.
In addition to the aircore program, Navarre completed 5,000m of diamond drilling on the adjacent New Bendigo Line within the project.
Assays remain pending from the last five holes of that campaign, but the company noted this program had already delivered standout results.
This included a 1m interval grading 15.6g/t gold from 153.7m. Within this was a higher-grade zone of 0.4m at 38.3g/t gold.
Mr Holland said the company looked forward to announcing the remaining results from the New Bendigo Line along with assays from the new program underway across the Nelson Line.
Navarre is well-funded to advance St Arnaud and its other projects with $14.1 million in the bank at the end of June.