As I post on here, I do badger Sasha on a semi regular basis and often times the responses I get for him are, I can't answer that..it's a question for James (Tilsley).

After several of these built up and I couldn't get the answers I was looking for, at a time where I wasn't really in the mood to not have answers - he suggested I call James myself...so I did.

I left a msg for him and heard back from him 2 days later. Poor guy feels worse than a bag of bulk sample as he's battling some sort of virus and he was hopped up on antibitoics. He apologized for the delayed callback and asked how can I help you.

My premier question was....what is the purpose of this bulk sampling. I was not clear on the purpose of it and had mixed ideas of how the numbers could be used. If we establish a grade through the bulk sampling, can that grade be used as the determinant for a 43-101 resource estimate?

The short answer is yes.

He summarized the benefit of the bulk sampling for this deposit in that the larger the sample, the higher the grade will be. Said something about possibly taking samples all the way up to 10 Tonnes. This was not new to me and is covered in depth in the Hoov Report...so ya, ya, ya...once we establish this higher grade, will it serve any purpose?

The longer answer is that once they have established a grade through bulk sampling, this established grade CAN be used to measure the resource but you have to address the concerns of the box tickers. He referred to the box tickers 2 more times until he was starting to lose me....Jim, what are box tickers? The Regulators!

Ah, I see. Ok, I won't try to emulate the phone call but this is what I understood. The bulk sampling grade can be used to determine the estimate but it would have to be demonstrated to the Regulators that this is scientifically proven to be the case. Thereby you would have to support the area with enough bulk sampling to satisfy the Regulators. I am going to make an assumption and guess that the bulk sampling across the entirety of the showing deposit at this stage of the game is being done for that purpose. It was kind of the impression I got.

What about depth? Well...at SOME point we are going to have build a ramp to sample at depth.

Jim went on to tell me that Paul (the other Geo) did a study that included ALL of the assays from T1 and those included many assays that if you were going to mine this resource, you obviously wouldn't have included some drill holes. All of these assays combined by the drill came to .5g/t. This exact same area, when bulk sampled (and yes, they included crappy areas in the bulk sample..I don't know why) came back at 3g/t. That's a grade multiplier of 6 by my math.

However, Jim is sticking to the fact that a grade of 1.5-2 by the drill is coming back at 3g/t in the bulk sample, or that the grades will be 50% better with a bulk sampling. He said that if the grades are coming back between 1.5 - 2g/t they will be 'ecstatic' and if the grades come closer to .5g/t then (and I'm paraphrasing here) then more work wil need to be done via bulk sampling.

I'll write another post....