A 400- by 800-metre claim block east of Rainy River Resources‘ (RR-T) flagship gold project in northwestern Ontario is causing a big commotion at the project’s operator, Bayfield Ventures (BYV-V).
Bayfield has drilled into a bonanza-grade mineralized zone at least twice since optioning the small sliver of land called the Burns Block in late 2007. This year, it plans to complete 100,000 metres of drilling in an attempt
to prove that economic mineralization from Rainy River’s main OMD/17 zone extends onto its property.
To that end, Bayfield reported an eye-catching intersection last month grading 8.66 grams gold per tonne and 57.67 grams silver at 80 metres, starting from a downhole depth of just 16 metres, including a smaller bonanza-grade zone about halfway through. The results shot the company’s shares up 51%, from 59¢ to 89¢, on a record-high trading volume of 10.4 million shares on June 27, the day results were released.
The problem, at least according to the British Columbia Securities Commission (BCSC), is in the way Bayfield has reported its assays. On June 30, BCSC forced Bayfield to restate its latest drill results, as well as selected results dating back to September 2010, in order to “clarify certain details of its technical disclosure of drill results,” with Bayfield admitting, “The drill results are potentially confusing, as certain larger intervals were reported by diluting high-grade intercepts over longer intervals of lower-grade gold and silver mineralization.”
The BCSC says the 80-metre intersection grading 8.66 grams gold and 57.67 grams silver is more
accurately reported as a 26-metre intersection grading 26.7 grams gold and 170.69 grams silver, with most of that in turn coming from an 11-metre section grading 60.05 grams and 362.96 grams silver, starting from a depth of 48 metres.
The rest of the interval, says Exploration Insights newsletter writer and geologist, Brent Cook, is essentially “waste rock.” (Bayfield calls it a “broad halo of anomalous to multigram-level gold and silver mineralization.”) Indeed, when the 11-metre section is removed using a tool designed by Cook called the Drill Hole Interval Calculator, the remaining 68 metres of the drill hole have a residual grade of just 0.23 gram gold and 7.6 grams silver.
In a June 28 telephone interview with The Northern Miner from his office in Vancouver, Bayfield’s president Don Huston defended his company’s way of reporting the assays, arguing it is a regular practice to calculate an average of high- and low-grade sections, and that it was compliant with National Instrument 43-101. “I’m not trying to smoke anybody,” Huston said. “I’m showing that we have tonnage and grade equal to the $9 stock (Rainy River). And that’s a fact. . . should I report every metre, and show a chart twelve metres long?”
Huston acknowledged that the vast majority of the hole outside the high-grade zone graded below 0.4 gram gold, which is under Bayfield’s cut-off grade, and therefore not significant. He declined to comment on Cook’s methodology, but said he is familiar with it.
Huston maintains there is “good reason to believe” the mineralized zone found near surface in the latest hole RR11-71 is the same zone, or is connected to a high-grade zone found at the other side of the property in September 2010. That hole, RR10-18, returned an impressive 81 metres grading 5.08 grams gold, although most of that can be attributed to a 10-metre section grading 35.93 grams gold starting from a depth of 497 metres.
The holes are 350 metres away from each other on surface, but because of the variance in depth, the actual distance between the holes – and the potential length of the high-grade mineralized shoot – is approximately 600 metres.
According to Cook, who spoke to The Northern Miner about Bayfield’s latest results via telephone from just north of San Diego, “When you get these high-grade veins . . . usually they are nuggety, and Bayfield has showed pictures of coarse gold in the core, so you know it’s nuggety. So, the issue becomes one of continuity. How far can you project a high-grade intercept along strike or plunge? Usually not far.
“My sense of what they’ve got is maybe there is a rather small shoot that plunges from north to south that goes across what they’re drilling. Certainly, from the data we’ve seen, this is not a very disseminated deposit.”
Bob Marvin, Bayfield’s exploration manager and senior project geologist for Burns Block, acknowledges it has been “very
difficult” to establish continuity of the high-grade shoot over a significant length. Speaking from Bayfield’s field camp near the Burns property, Marvin told The Northern Miner, “There’s absolutely no intention on our part, or certainly my part, to say that we see a lot of continuity, because clearly we have not. Now, whether that’s because we’ve missed or because there’s a true lack of continuity, I really think you’d have to go underground to establish.”
Marvin noted the high-grade shoot is contained within a well-established east-west trending zone of strong foliation, sericite alteration, locally intense deformation and highly variable pyrite mineralization. He pointed out drill hole RR10-15 may have picked up the shoot at a depth of 190 metres, with assays returning 9 metres of 12.88 grams gold, including a 3-metre section grading 31.71 grams gold. Many other holes have failed to demonstrate much continuity within high-grade zone, including hole RR10-9, which was drilled 25 metres along strike of the original high-grade discovery, hole RR10-18, and returned 20 metres of 1.2 grams gold, with the best interval within that intercept grading 9.93 grams gold over 2 metres.
According to Marvin, Bayfield has yet to prove much economically significant gold mineralization exists outside of the broader envelope that includes the high-grade shoot. “There is (some) evidence, but at this point, ninety-eight percent of every ounce if we were to do a resource would be within the zone.”
Rainy River previously optioned a majority interest in the property from Bayfield in 2007, but dropped the option amid the financial crisis in November 2008 after drilling seven holes.
Rainy River’s namesake project boasts 4.1 million oz. gold in the measured and indicated category, in a conceptual open pit containing 115.5 million tonnes grading 1.11 grams gold, as well as 1.8 million oz. gold inferred. Besides hosting significant silver values, the deposit also has an underground resource estimated at 1.8 million tonnes measured and indicated, grading 4.82 grams gold for 290,800 oz. gold.
Having raised over $10 million in the past year, Bayfield should be well equipped in 2011 to drill out much of the Burns Block, and explore its nearby properties in the Rainy River area, including its C Block half a dozen kilometres to the west, and its B Block a few kilometres to the north.
Helping raise nearly half of Bayfield’s money was the Casey Research Group, which has been touting the stock as a potential takeover target since September 2010. The Casey Group’s monthly International Speculator newsletter has recommended its readers buy the stock no less than seven times in the subsequent nine months. Some of them must have listened, as three Casey employees (Marin Katusa, Marc Bustin and Joe Hung) found themselves the recipients of a $249,999 cash finder’s fee in October 2010, after helping Bayfield sell $5-million worth of stock in a flow-through private placement at $1.40 a share. The trio also received 178,572 finder’s warrants for their efforts.
Insider trading reports of Bayfield’s management show that no fewer than six insiders sold a combined total of approximately 589,000 shares shortly after the company released the first set of drill results that found the high-grade mineralized zone in late September 2010. The
stock fell almost 65% in the following nine months, reaching a low of 50¢ in mid-June.
The latest round of drill results has proved little different, with four Bayfield insiders selling stock on the day the company released the assays. Huston sold 80,000 shares at 83¢ each; chairman Jim Pettit sold 90,000 shares at prices ranging from 87¢ to 94¢; exploration manager Marvin sold 64,000 shares around 83¢ apiece; and Burns Block project geologist Shane Hu sold all 25,500 of his shares at an average of 91¢ each. Huston and Pettit exercised options a week later to buy 50,000 shares and 200,000 shares, respectively, at 39¢ a share.
After their big leap on June 27 from 59¢ to an intraday high of $1.02, shares of the company have retreated back to a low of 66¢ on July 4. At presstime on July 5, they were trading up 5¢ to 71¢ on 327,000 shares traded. Bayfield has 62 million shares outstanding, 72 million if fully diluted.
Its simple arithmetic to do length-weighted average calculations to work out drillhole intervals as described. So I find Brent Cooks tool -the “Drillhole Interval Calculator” – quite ammusing. Some people can sell, and some will buy, anything!