Francisco cuts more high-grade gold at Marlin

Vancouver — Francisco Gold (FGX-T) has tabled more impressive results from an ongoing 3,000-metre drill program at its wholly owned Marlin gold-silver project in western Guatemala.

Since April, Francisco has drilled 25 holes totalling 2,480 metres. The company says the results indicate that the Main zone now extends for at least 400 metres to the northeast and southwest and is about 350 metres wide. Drilling has yet to define the limits of mineralization in any direction.

The program is designed to test the extent of mineralization south, east and west of the Main zone and to evaluate the Don Tello structural corridor.

The Main zone is a low-sulphidation, epithermal gold-silver system hosted in a Tertiary-aged andesitic volcanic package cut by latite dykes. It sits atop a 1.5-km-long ridge that trends east-west at elevations of 2,200-2,300 metres.

The Don Tello-Los Tomates structural corridor lies 200-300 metres south of the Main zone and extends for a distance of more than 1,200 metres. It is dominated by a central, sub-vertical quartz-calcite vein and marginal stockwork envelope.

The most recent results confirm that high-grade gold-silver mineralization continues to the south and west of the Main Zone, as well as to depth along the Don Tello corridor. Highlights of the results are as follows:

• Hole M-25 — 38 metres grading 2.58 grams gold and 42.3 grams silver per tonne, including an 18-metre section grading 5.27 grams gold;
• Hole M-26 — 53 metres grading 2.2 grams gold and 44.5 grams silver, including a 9-metre section that ran 6.39 grams gold;
• Hole M-27 — 51 metres grading 2.63 grams gold and 58.2 grams silver, including a 3-metre interval that ran 25.31 grams gold and 317.7 grams silver;
• Hole M-28 — 152 metres grading 1.13 grams gold and 47.2 grams silver;
• Hole M-29 — 14 metres grading 3.7 grams gold and 27.7 grams silver, including 4 metres that assayed 6.09 grams gold and 9.5 grams silver;
• Hole M-30 — 5 metres grading 1.57 grams gold and 47.6 grams silver;
• Hole M-31 — 21 metres grading 2.1 grams gold and 36 grams silver;
• Hole M-32 — 44 metres grading 5.41 grams gold and 38.5 grams silver, based on 40% core recovery;
• Hole M-33 — 9 metres grading 37.23 grams gold and 123.2 grams silver; and
• Hole M-34 — 58 metres averaging 2.17 grams gold and 115.9 grams silver.

Drill results from holes 26 and 28 indicate that the southern edge of the high-grade Main zone extends for an additional 150 metres to the south-southeast. Holes 25 and 33 extend mineralization in Main an additional 50 metres to the northeast. Additional holes were completed and the results are still pending.

Holes 32 and 34 were drilled directly northwest and west of the Main zone. They intersected near-surface high-grade intervals of mineralization more than 40 metres thick and expanded the Main zone to the west by about 50 metres. Francisco believes that mineralization is continuous further to the northwest and west of the tested area. Additional drilling will examine this theory.

Hole 29, the first of six holes drilled along the Don Tello structural corridor, was collared 200 metres south of the Main zone. It intersected a 14-metre mineralized zone (approximate true width). The indication is that mineralization extends from surface to at least 45 metres deep. The company has drilled five more holes along a 400-metre strike length of the corridor.

Francisco also reports that rock channel samples from a drill road returned a 40-metre interval that averaged 2.6 grams gold and 34.3 grams silver. These results were taken form a previously untested area southeast of the main zone.

Additional drill and trenching results are expected in three or four weeks.