Matador is setting the stage for inaugural Cape Ray winter drilling

Matador is planning a February 2022 start for its inaugural winter season drill program of 30 diamond holes at the Cape Ray gold project in Newfoundland, Canada.

This comes as greenfields exploration continues to generate quality targets with early results at the Big Pond and Benton prospects illustrating the prospectivity for gold.

Matador Mining (ASX:MZZ) has also held the first positive in-person community meetings since COVID-19 restrictions began.

“We are nearing the end of our ‘summer’ campaign which has been more expansive than any of our previous programs and have commenced detailed planning required for the potential ‘winter’ campaign, another first for Matador,” executive chairman Ian Murray said.

“Our exploration pyramid continues to evolve as we identify new conceptual targets, and then actively move them either up the pyramid or strike them out.”

Greenfields exploration

The company’s systematic power auger drilling at Benton and Stag Hill, and a large till survey at Malachite Lake, have upgraded several targets in its inventory.

It has collected more than 1,200 conventional till samples over a 12km by 4km area at Malachite Lake that hosts several priority areas of interest identified in the recent high resolution aeromagnetic data.

Multiple highly prospective fault splays off the Cape Ray Shear Zone have been identified coincident with a large bend in the main CRSZ structure, an area where no past exploration has been carried out.

Power auger geochemistry drilling is underway at Stag Hill, which was identified as a highly prospective greenfields target through a combination of the evaluation of historic soil sampling data and interpretation of the new high resolution magnetics data.

Assays from the first holes have already identified anomalous gold trends, including a peak 136 parts per billion gold value proximal to the Windsor Point Group Sediments margin.

Power auger drilling at Benton has outlined multiple gold and pathfinder geochemical anomalies with several coincident high-priority structural targets identified in the detailed magnetics.

Assays are also pending from first-pass diamond drilling at the Big Bond and Benton targets with initial results received to date including 1.1m at 1.4g/t gold from 69.3m and 1m at 1.2g/t gold from 35m.

Two diamond rigs are also carrying out infill and extension drilling to grow the mineralised footprint at the Window Glass Hill deposit.

This article was developed in collaboration with Matador Mining, a Stockhead advertiser at the time of publishing.

This article does not constitute financial product advice. You should consider obtaining independent advice before making any financial decisions.