Solstice having its day in the sun as gold drilling results start flowing in

Yarri is 150km northeast of Kalgoorlie and despite it being prime Goldfields real estate, it is underexplored.

Until recently, most of Solstice’s work has been aircore drilling to test blind targets and follow geochemistry.

“You do a lot of work, and you’re hoping to make the step change, but no one really believes it until you get the RC rig going,” Solstice managing director Nick Castleden said.

“We’ve just started to get some traction, so finally we’ve got the RC rigs going, and it’s making a big difference to us.”

The drilling kicked off at the start of last month, with 2000m drilled at Statesman Well, 1050m completed at Bluetooth and two holes completed at Edjudina Range.

Initial results have started to filter through in the past couple of weeks.

The first hole at Edjudina Range returned 20m at 1.02 grams per tonne from 36m, while Bluetooth returned multiple shallow hits including 20m at 2.18g/t gold from 28m; 20m at 2.01g/t gold from 20m, including 4m at 6.18g/t; and 16m at 2.13g/t gold from 48m.

On Wednesday, Solstice reported the first results from Statesman Well, which included 8m at 7.94g/t gold from 12m, including 1m at 39.75g/t gold from 13m, and 1m at 16.1g/t gold from 19m.

“There are three prospects that are all in the same patch of geology. It’s about a 30km stretch of all the same geological trend, and for some reason, it’s been a little bit underexplored relative to the belts to the east and the west,” Castleden said.

“At the northern end, this Bluetooth prospect has really started to take shape, and it probably overperformed, I think, in terms of what we expected with the RC rig.

“The intercepts we put out last week were really strong, and this has kind of got a real commercial look about some of those cross sections we put out, and I think that really got the market’s attention, because everyone knows that ounces near surface have real value in that they’re moving to the nearest mill pretty fast these days.”

Yarri is close to mills including Carosue Dam and Sunrise Dam.

RC drilling is about to resume.

“I think the way we see the next few months rolling is we’re going to be fairly steady state exploration, because we’ve got so many live leads to follow up,” Castleden said.

Copper option

Earlier this year, Solstice acquired the Nanadie copper-gold project in WA’s Murchison region for A$1 million cash and 3 million shares, with a further 3 million shares payable within four years if a resource of more than 250,000 tonnes of contained copper is defined.

Nanadie already has an inferred resource of 40.4 million tonnes at 0.4% copper and 0.1g/t gold for 162,000t of contained copper and 130,000oz of gold.

“We’re super, super happy having it in the stable,” Castleden said.

“It’s got an interesting history in that it sat in the background of companies, rather than being its lead project so it has never had a big market understanding. There’s an opportunity for us to really bring it forward.

“It’s probably become more topical in terms of the lack of potential copper development stories. Analysts are putting Nanadie on their list of projects to watch, because it’s such a short list. It’s not as if you’re competing with 100 gold ideas.”

While the resource is low grade, Castleden describes it as a “big block” of mineralisation.

“It’s 150m wide. It’s 900m long. We think we can make it longer and wider,” he said. “This thing has 50-100m intercepts all over it, and that’s the point of difference.”

Solstice is working on defining drill targets ahead of RC drilling in the second half of the year.

Market support building

Solstice has had a good run off the back of the drilling results, with the stock rallying by around 40% so far this month.

“People look at us now and they see it’s gone up a long way but forget that we’ve only got 100 million shares on issue and A$13 million in cash,” Castleden said.

“Relative to peers and assets and the potential for some of these things to go to resource ounces, I think we’re really cheap.”

Solstice has good institutional backing with Precision Opportunities Fund holding 9.9% and Russell Delroy’s Nero Resources Fund with 6.7%.

Resources entrepreneur Tim Goyder holds 2.4%, while board and associates hold 6.7%.

With gold trading at A$5200 an ounce, Castleden said it’s never been easier for a WA gold junior to get into production quickly in the event of a discovery.

“It’s good market for getting busy,” he said. “We’ve got plenty of financial capacity, which is nice to be able to go with successive drill campaigns and head towards a resource drill-out without having to raise any funds.”