In early July, Falcon announced the first hole at its Blue Moon prospect near Bendigo had intersected several narrow high-grade gold-bearing quartz lodes.

Results included 2.2m at 6.5 grams per tonne gold from 41.2m, including 0.3m at 39.2g/t gold; 2.4m at 8.4g/t gold, including 0.3m at 48.7g/t gold and 0.3m at 18.2g/t gold.

The market didn’t really notice until a week later, when Falcon announced the first wedge hole off the parent hole had intersected laminated quartz vein containing visible gold.

The hole returned 1.2m at 543g/t gold from 544.2m comprising 0.6m at 557g/t gold and 0.6m at 529g/t Au from 544.8m, sending the stock surging.

The company has drilled a further two wedge holes with a fourth in progress.

While assays are pending, it announced on the first day of Diggers & Dealers earlier this month that the third wedge hole had intersected several zones of visible gold, as well as a 7.6m zone of quartz veining with sulphides, likely representing a saddle reef.

Once in a Blue Moon

Falcon and the Pyramid Hill gold project in Victoria were spun-out of Chalice Mining in late 2021 following Chalice’s Julimar discovery in 2020.

Falcon managing director Tim Markwell said Blue Moon wasn’t actually part of the original assets.

“We were just doing the final stages of the IPO and listing and all the focus at that time was on Fosterville, because of the craziness of the Swan Zone and how good it was, but people weren’t really paying attention to Bendigo,” he said.

“Then the exploration licence that surrounded the former Bendigo mining lease suddenly became available without any sort of fanfare. It just suddenly popped up on the system as available ground, so we applied for this ground around Bendigo.”

Falcon now has the ground that almost completely surrounds the 22 million ounce Bendigo orebody.

The company’s exploration manager, a Bendigo local, had a theory that the mineralisation continued to the north but hadn’t been tested due to the depth.

“The Bendigo mine basically produced more than 200,000 ounces a year for 60 years, up until the First World War, so it was a pretty phenomenal deposit,” Markwell said.

“The mining stops at our tenement boundary and it starts to get deeper by that point, 400m or 500m deep, and as you get to our tenement boundary, all the shafts are very shallow, because the old timers were never able to reach it … and then, oddly, none of the more modern groups that have had this ground ever did any exploration testing this theory.”

Falcon had a historian help it put together old cross sections and maps of the underground workings of the mine.

“When we did all our research, we confirmed that the best place to drill was the Garden Gully line, because that was the most productive reef, and it’s the one where those shafts  are on the mining boundary, then it stops,” Markwell said.

“So we literally just drilled a hole, drilling back towards the tenement boundary, down the fold hinge on the eastern side of the folding and hey presto! We got multiple zones of visible gold, including that jackpot zone of 1.2m of 543 grams, which was just dripping with visible gold.

“I think that’s why people have got excited, because it’s not like it’s 100,000 ounces next to us. This is 22 million ounces next to us, and we’ve confirmed that the mineralisation certainly continues onto our licence, particularly in that Garden Gully line of reef.

“But there’s nine other reefs as well that we haven’t even thought about testing yet, and then the strike extent of our ground goes for 5-plus kilometres.”

Strong market support

The stock has run from A18c to as high as A85c off the back of the results.

Late last week, Falcon raised A$20 million at A57c per share, leaving it with A$27.8 million cash to continue exploration, which will include around 30,000m of diamond drilling.

Given Canadian companies have owned Fosterville for many years, there’s a lot of interest in Victoria from the North American market, as evidenced by Southern Cross Gold’s recent Toronto listing.

“We did have good interest from North Americans in the capital raise,” Markwell said.

The company’s register already comprised just over 14% institutional investors prior to the raise.

Chalice founder Tim Goyder holds 9% of Falcon, having spent around A$160,000 to top up his stake last month when news of the Blue Moon discovery first emerged.

Chalice managing director Alex Dorsch sits on the Falcon board as a non-executive director.

Falcon is chaired by successful geologist Dr Mark Bennett, who is searching for his own Fosterville repeat via his other company S2 Resources.