Apollo Consolidated (ASX:AOP) could do itself “a disservice” if a maiden gold resource at Lake Rebecca is calculated prematurely, says managing director Nick Castleden.

There are now three advanced prospects at Apollo’s flagship Lake Rebecca project in WA — Rebecca, Duke and Duchess — with the Rebecca discovery area emerging as current crowd favourite.

Since late 2017, multiple, high-grade lodes have been identified in a 1.3km-long area at Rebecca.

And it keeps getting bigger. “Open” means they haven’t found where the gold ends yet:

An ongoing 20,000m drill program, to run through the second and third quarters, will underpin a maiden resource estimate for the wider project – at some point. Lake Rebecca has been described by Apollo as a “live and growing” discovery in a prime location, which means Apollo isn’t under much pressure to quantify where they are right now.

People are more interested in the exploration upside, Castleden says.

“We’re obviously pretty happy with the way things are coming along,” he told Stockhead.

“We’ve made noise to the effect that we’d be looking at resource numbers toward the end of the year; but we are also conscious of doing these things at the right time.

“Until we know where the systems end, we can do ourselves a bit of a disservice calculating a resource too early.”

Particularly when there is so many open surfaces, and a lot of areas across Lake Rebecca that haven’t been drilled at all.

There are times when companies are valued on resource ounces, and there are times when they are not, says Castleden.

“You can be pigeonholed into ‘this company has xyz ounces’ and that’s the end of the story,” he says.

“For us, right now, we are nowhere near the end of the story.”