Navarre begins exploration at Tandarra

THE DRILL SERGEANT: Having raised $3.2 million from a recent entitlement offer Victoria gold exploration company Navarre Minerals is set to kick off the next stage of a drilling and geophysical testing program at its Bendigo North gold project.

Navarre has an air-core rig ready to commence drilling on the Tandarra prospect, located 40 kilometres north of Bendigo, on a preliminary 20 hole program.

This program is scheduled to be followed by a larger $4.2 million 50,000 metre drill program scheduled for October through to May 2012.

This larger program will also involve 110 line kilometres of geophysical survey as follow-up to significant gold intercepts the company drilled during May.

“The key feature of our exploration strategy is an ability to target quartz reefs buried beneath the Murray Basin sediments,” Navarre Minerals managing director Geoff McDermott said in the company’s announcement to the Australian Securities Exchange.

“These reefs are known to start from only 30 metres below the surface at Tandarra.”

From the May drilling program the company announced a 10 metre intercept of gold assaying 34.4 grams per tonne, starting at shallow depth of 37 metres below surface.

A subsequent geophysical survey of the target zone conducted in July delineated further drill sites, which will form the basis of the 20 hole preliminary stage program.

“We have completed a great deal of preparatory work on this program,” McDermott continued.

“Our early drilling is highly promising and our theories on an analogy with the Bendigo Goldfield to the south are now to be fully tested.”

The company said its main targets for the extended program are the quartz reefs, which it considers to potentially contain gold.

“The reefs are like tunnels of quartz that extend for several hundreds of metres, running largely north-south, parallel to the controlling fault structure of the region, the Whitelaw Fault”  McDermott said.

“Our proposition is that the same fault is integral to the control of the gold accumulations in the Bendigo Goldfield to the south, a field which has produced around 22 million ounces of gold since its discovery in the 1850s.

“These prospects have lain hidden by sands and clays of the Murray Basin cover for millions of years.

“It is highly likely that if they had outcropped, as they did at Bendigo, the old timers would have discovered them.”