Tolga Kumova has made a motza from being an early backer of Bellevue Gold (ASX:BGL) before it had its high-grade gold success at its namesake project in Western Australia.

He remains an 8 per cent Bellevue shareholder and as was mentioned here on April 1, his hunt for a potential repeat performer led him to Brazilian gold explorer Meteoric Resources (ASX:MEI).

Meteoric was a 1.2c stock back on April 1 and it has since motored on to 4.2c as things in its Amazon Basin gold hunt heat up, with Kumova having recently kicked in another $900,000 at 3.2c to a $2.7m placement by Meteoric to keep the momentum going.

The placement took his stake from 10.6 per cent to 12.1 per cent in the now $35m company, up from $8m back on April 1.

Interest in Meteoric picked up last Friday on its report that its first drill hole at the Juruena project had intersected visible gold within a 16m zone at the Dona Maria prospect.

Assays from the intersection are pending and it seems likely the results will bolster confidence that the resource at Juruena will end up being something bigger than the current 1.3mt grading 6.3 grams per tonne (g/t) of gold for 261,000oz (contained).

The funny thing is that it is not Juruena that has got Kumova excited, again. It’s the company’s Novo Astro project, 28km southeast and along trend from Juruena.

It turns out that Kumova is a big fan of the hard yakka by Brazil’s garimpeiros (independent miners) in being pathfinders to something potentially large, and using Google to uncover the history of exploration projects.

Novo Astro has never been tested by a drill bit despite Garimpeiro’s Brazilian cousins working both alluvial and hard-rock gold in the area for decades, winning enough gold to support a makeshift town of the same name complete with pubs and shops, and those other establishments generally found in remote mining towns.

The alluvial workings are not of interest to Meteoric, or Kumova. What is of interest is the multiple shallow pits dug by the garimpeiros from which Meteoric has been taking samples from within fresh rock.

Results from the sampling are pending but Kumova said a Google search on the history of the area uncovered some historic sampling results of interest.

He wouldn’t say how interesting but a search by Garimpeiro turned up a 2013 report by a previous owner, Lago Dourado, which pulled out after spending all its money on trying to prove up a big porphyry target back at Juruena.

That company’s sampling program at Novo Astro returned 13 samples grading better than 10g/t gold, with one sample of a shear zone with a quartz vein returning a spectacular 263.8g/t. Still, it has never been drilled, something Meteoric is out to fix.

Lago Dourado said it interpreted Novo Astro to be a classical-lode style structural system with gold hosted within intensely formed shear zones and sheeted veins.

“The mineralised system is large based on a contiguous gold-in-soil anomaly of 2km by 2km, and hosts high-grade zones, based on assay values of rock chip samples,’’ the company said.

Meteoric is aiming to kick off a drilling program at Novo Astro late next month with the targets having being defined and refined by its own recent sampling program.

The program is funded by the recent placement and will involve moving one of the two drilling rigs at Juruena to Novo Astro ahead of another rig being mobilised to Juruena to complete Meteoric’s maiden drilling program there.

“It’s Novo’s near-surface high-grade gold potential that interests me,’’ Kumova told Garimpeiro.

“And then there is the fact that a whole bunch of garimpeiros have been working in the area for a long time. Those guys don’t bust their arses for nothing.’’

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