Golden Dory Resources’ (GDR-V) president and CEO, Kevin Keats, has been a prospector for as long as he can remember. When he was just a toddler growing up in Benton, Nfld., his father, who worked for Noranda for 35 years, used to take him out prospecting with him.
“He carried me in his backpack when my legs got tired,” Keats says.
And when Keats got a little older, around the age of 10, he began prospecting with his friends.
“All the kids would play ‘Cowboys and Indians,’ but we didn’t; we played ‘Noranda,'” he says. Keats and his friends would set up a tent and cut lines with an axe, making a grid to map their findings, he says.
“We didn’t really know what we were looking for,” he chuckles.
But he eventually learned. He worked for Noranda for 10 years, followed by Inco and a few junior companies, searching for minerals in Canada, Indonesia, Mexico and Peru.
He eventually started his own company, ASK Prospecting, with his father, wife and brother, selling prospective claims to mining companies.
Prospecting goes back more than a century for the Keats family. His great great grandfather, Souley Joe Keats of the Mikmaq band, found silver mineralization while out trapping one day.
“He died before he could show anyone, but the story stayed in our family,” Keats says.
That’s what prompted Keats’s grandfather and father to approach Noranda. The company wasn’t looking for silver but it was looking for prospectors, and from there, a mining family was born.
Currently, 21 of Keats’s relatives are employed in the mining industry. In 2006, the Keats-Stares family received the Bill Dennis Prospector of the Year Award (Stares is the maiden name of Keats’s mother).
After years of thinking about starting his own exploration company, Keats decided to go ahead with his dream in 2007, after his cousin, Steven Stares, president and CEO of Benton Resources (BTC-V, BNRJF-O) (named after the town), gave him a pep talk.
“He said, ‘Kev, you should just do this,'” Keats recalls.
And so he did, recruiting a technical and management team and finding some properties. Golden Dory listed on the TSX Venture Exchange last September with a $1.8-million initial public offering.
The company has four 100%- owned properties and a few joint ventures, all in Newfoundland and Labrador. In late February, Golden Dory took on a 60% interest in the Huxter Lane gold property, located in central Newfoundland, with Paragon Minerals (PGR-V, PAONF-O). The property is next to Golden Dory’s 100%-owned Brady gold property, and the two projects together cover 100 sq. km.
Highlights from recent drilling at Huxter Lane’s Mosquito target include 28.6 metres grading 1.07 grams gold per tonne, including 6.7 metres grading 2.27 grams gold starting at 5.9 metres.
In another hole, the drill cut 35 metres grading 2.21 grams gold, starting from 115 metres depth. That interval included 20.2 metres of 1.68 grams gold and 4 metres at 4.16 grams gold.
The company plans to do more diamond drilling in the second quarter of 2009 and a resource estimate by the end of the year.
On its Burin uranium property, which also has copper, zinc, silver, bismuth and molybdenum mineralization, Golden Dory has found some promising rock samples. The average grade from 266 rock samples was 68.9 parts per million (ppm) U3O8 and when the highest-grade samples were eliminated, the average was 51.8 ppm. The company plans to follow up on the rock sample results and the airborne radiometric and magnetic surveys done in 2007 and 2008.
Keats admits that Golden Dory went public at a pretty awkward time, but although part of him wishes he’d started up the junior company sooner, he is positive about the future.
If the company had raised a lot of money when the markets were hot, the company would be feeling the current market turmoil more deeply, and shareholders would have experienced a loss. Starting at the bottom, there’s nowhere to go but up, Keats says.
Working in his home province has its perks. Keats says the people are supportive — so much so, that a stranger offered to get the local fire truck to spray down some rock when he was out prospecting one day.
“Newfoundland is dear to our hearts, it’s our backyard,” he says. “We will leave no stone unturned.”
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