All rigs point to Marwari target as Strickland flies high

Strickland Metals’ share price has renewed a wild rise that has seen a 446 per cent jump in just eight months as it flew more than 59 per cent today on intriguing news at its Marwari gold play near the Western Australian town of Wiluna.

In a seemingly sudden twist, the company has revealed it now has all of its diamond and reverse-circulation (RC) drill rigs focussed on exploring the potential of Marwari after it decided to plunge drill an extra 111m into its first diamond hole.

Management has further added to the intrigue by confirming it had sent core from the hole to Perth for “fast tracked assays”. It has also outlined immediate plans to drill four additional diamond holes at the target in a fully-focussed mission.

Strickland Metals chief executive officer said “Strickland is now sufficiently confident in expanding the drilling program at Marwari … (and) has elected to commit both rigs to drilling at Marwari for the immediate future.”

Marwari is a new, high-grade gold target within Strickland’s Horse Well prospect in the Yandal greenstone belt, about 85km north-east of Wiluna.

Just a week ago, the company revealed plans to start a 440m diamond drillhole program designed to home in on Marwari, where air-core (AC) drilling in September produced a solid gold hit. Management believed it may have indicated a new gold trend.

Its two planned 180m and 260m diamond holes at the time were designed to pass through the shells and the potentially-mineralised core of a geophysically-modelled magnetic anomaly.

The company believes the anomaly could be associated with magnetite alteration and gold mineralisation in a coherent magnetic body that plunges gently to the south and could possibly extend for more than 700m in strike.

It said the target looks as though it had just been clipped in the oxide zone by the solitary September discovery AC hole, which intersected 31m running a grade of 5.6 grams per tonne gold from 72m to bottom-of-hole. It included an 8m interval at an eye-catching 17.7g/t gold, which was virtually screaming to be followed up.

With that follow-up realised, it appears there is now a lot more to come.

Management says its first diamond hole had been originally planned for a target depth of only 180m, but it elected to continue the hole for a further 111m to total depth of 291m.

The RC rig was already on site and tasked to aggressively pattern drill on a 40m-by-40m grid through an initial 300m of strike south of the discovery hole and to set up three pre-collars for the diamond drill rig.

It has now been temporarily re-tasked to drill four pre-collars for diamond holes. The second has already been completed, the third has been started and the remaining two pre-collars will be knocked over before the rig returns to its pattern drilling.

Strickland says any RC holes in the pattern program which do not sufficiently penetrate the entirety of their targeted structures will be completed with diamond tails.

The second hole is being drilled 40m to the south of the discovery AC hole, while the third is planned to be a 40m step back from the first hole. The deeper fourth and fifth holes are to be drilled on 40m spacings to the south of the third hole, targeting the peak value zone of the interpreted magnetic body.

Management says it is still awaiting many sample results from its original 40,000m reconnaissance AC drill program, where the initial phase focused on mapping the Horse Well shear structures and outlined Marwari as the most recent success. It also confirmed that additional high-priority reconnaissance targets at Great Western and Rabbit Well, among others, were planned to be tested before the end of the year.

Horse Well lies within the company’s 100 per cent-owned Yandal project, in the northern part of the Yandal-Millrose greenstone belt in WA’s Warburton mineral field.

The project area is well-mineralised and has several additional prospects within the 45km strike of greenstone belt that hosts several multi-million-ounce gold projects including Jundee, Bronzewing and the Darlot-Centenary gold mine complex.

Strickland is clearly turning up the exploration heat at Horse Well and more particularly Marwari. It is well-funded to tear in after completing its sale of the Millrose gold deposit to Northern Star Resources in July for about $61 million.

And the company clearly already has the attention of the ASX marketplace, which will now be filled with a healthy appetite to find out what will come next.

Is your ASX-listed company doing something interesting? Contact: matt.birney@businessnews.com.au