News

August 28, 2008

After Disappointment On Sutakiki Solomon Gold Ventures Forth Across Guadalcanal

By Rob Davies

Three things make life difficult for explorers on Guadalcanal: heavy rainfall, steep terrain and complex geology. Anyone trying to understand what is going on also has to cope with unpronounceable names. So Minews was grateful for the opportunity to sit down with Nick Mather, chief executive of Solomon Gold, for a detailed briefing on the state of his company’s exploration programme on the island. After a long period during which the company seemed to be running on empty, Solomon finally delivered a fantastic drill intersection at the end of last year at Sutakiki, totalling 32 metres at 9.75 grammes per tonne gold in the Valehailala Creek part of the prospect.

Unfortunately, though, nearly nine months on and the company it has failed to build on that success, unable to repeat that sort of intersection anywhere else and thereby model a structure that might host a significant deposit. Nick now believes they were just lucky, or maybe unlucky, to put the drill hole right down the centre of small, 50 metres wide, highly mineralised sheared fault zone. All the drilling previous and subsequent to that one good intersection has been unable to define a...