The Golden Lounge

[Rocketred]

I'm waiting with really high interest to see what the drill holes look like coming out of Aston Bay (TSX-V:BAY)ATBHF - ASTON BAY HOLDINGS . And Aston Bay is actually a good counter point, if you will. I mean, it's a counterpoint in the sense that I talked to Tom Ulrich. And Tom, to use an example of another geo here, was quite adamant. He just said, “Look, I know everybody's reading into things because I'm not putting out core pics and I'm not putting out descriptions, but,” he said, “I don't care. I'm not doing that until I have assays. I'm just not doing that. I don't believe in that recent trend. I'm not comfortable with it as a geologist. If people want to take that and say that means the drill holes are lousy, he said, well so be it. I'm just not doing that. Wait for the assays.”As I pointed out to people, again, I'm not reading anything negative into the fact Tom is not doing that. I know Tom Ulrich. He's not comfortable doing it. So people shouldn't read anything into the fact he's not putting out core pictures and descriptions, other than the fact he refuses to do core pics ahead of assays. I wouldn't read anything into what those look like. In fact, I'll be pretty surprised if they don't have a couple of high-grade holes. Tom said there were a couple of holes reported from the single past drill campaign at Buckingham that had some fairly significant lengths of low-grade gold in the wall lock, basically within pyrite in the country rock, part of the same event probably. He's as interested in that. He said, “I know high-grade is what will get people excited if we get that but I also like the idea of broader lower grade zones to add scale.”

The other thing I'm really watching for at Aston Bay, and I really hope it shows up like in the next few days because I've been waiting for it for several weeks now, is he's been working on a very expanded land agreement. He's going to be expanding the size of the exploration lease there significantly, by an order of magnitude at least. He's apparently pretty much got it negotiated with the owner, which is a lumber company. And he says they're just going through the paperwork. They're fairly complex agreements. The last couple of times I talked to him it was quote/unquote days away.

I'm hoping that gets out before he gets any drill results because I think, again, he'd like to be able to more fully describe his target, but he's not very comfortable doing it until he knows he's got the expanded land position. Like most geos, he's paranoid about somebody staking around him. He wants to be sure he's got that tied up. So, I'm expecting land agreement news first and I'm hoping when he announces that he's also going to include an actual map with more target information. Something that shows the trend, the soil geochemical and geophysical anomalies, where its still open, that sort of thing, in relation to where they just drilled. Here's the target scale in other words, which I think is bigger than market appreciates right now. That one I think can still get pretty interesting.

Goldfinger: Can you give readers a little bit of a background of how Aston Bay found this project?

Eric Coffin: Yeah. Aston Bay, their initial focus and it's something Tom still really likes and really wants to work on, is the Storm Project up in the Arctic. And it's way up in the Arctic. I mean, that's a great project. I really like that project too. But, you're dealing with blind sedimentary copper targets, which is not the easiest thing in the world. And it's very expensive to drill up there. So raising money at $.05 or $.06 or $.07 to drill that would be crazy, which he realizes.

I think Tom had looked at some of this stuff in Virginia, and the project we're talking about is in Virginia. He looked at it several years ago when he was working at Antofagasta And he liked the project, but the company he was working for is only interested in copper. The Virginia project is actually as series of separate targets, both base metal and gold. He said it's not one property. It's a data set that covers a large area in Virginia. There's a bunch of different targets, some of them are high-grade gold, some of them are VMS.

But, as it turns out, the guy that controls that data set and had done some past work on it is a guy by the name of Don Taylor. Don Taylor has become justifiably fairly famous recently. Most traders are pretty familiar with Arizona Zinc, they got taken out for $1.5 billion a few months ago by South32. South32 bought that in order to get control of the Taylor Deposit. And it's called the Taylor Deposit for a reason. It's named after Don because Don's the one who found it. Very nice guy, very smart geo. And he always kind of had this stuff in his back pocket.

I’d never really heard of the Virginia project until it was picked up by Aston Bay. I later found out, from talking to friends that a bunch of very high level geos, very successful discovery geologists, a lot of names people would recognize from other companies, were shareholders in this private Jacks Fork deal that controlled all this data. And in Virginia, essentially all of the eastern U.S really, mineral title part of and tied to surface title. And virtually all the land ownership is private. The mineral tenure is part and parcel of the land tenure so, in order to get mineral rights, you have to do a deal with the landowner to allow you to explore and allow you to benefit from whatever you discover.

The downside of that is it gets really complicated because you're dealing with land parcels and you've got to do all these separate negotiations. Tom went after the targets that he did initially for a couple of reasons. One is that they were high-grade gold targets and he's got no illusions. That's what people are most interested in right now, though Tom is a base metal guy at heart. But also, it happens to be on large scale landholdings that are controlled by forestry companies. And those forestry companies, he said, they're not hard to deal with. They think it's great. In terms of the size of their land holdings, even if BAY made a discovery and it became very successful and there was going to be a mine, it's like a pinprick in terms of the size of their land holdings and the potential gain for them off of royalty payments and stuff is quite large. The forestry companies are willing to deal.

They were happy to do it, but it's just something that hadn't been done much before. It took them a long time to find a lawyer that could even negotiate the stuff. They're a lot more complicated than just going and staking a claim. It isn't easy working through that process. I'm hoping to see two or three of these land agreements show up soon. So, Virginia was strange in the sense that the data came before the title. And because of that, BAY has been very circumspect in how they talked about it because they don't want anybody else going in and trying to negotiate for areas that BAY is in the middle of trying to get. It's an unusual thing, but it comes with a pretty good pedigree.

Don Taylor is arguably one of the most successful geologists in recent years, by far, due to his zinc discovery in Arizona named after him. The Taylor Project now owned by South32. This being one of Don's things, something Don hung onto for years and explored for years on his own with a group of friends that carries a lot of weight with me. So I think BAY's got two really interesting projects. I think he's doing the smart thing by focusing on Virginia because it's more of a year-round area. It's way cheaper to explore. The drill costs in Virginia are a small fraction of what they would be up on Somerset Island (Storm Copper Project).

So, I think it's a pretty interesting deal. And I have a lot of respect for a guy like Tom Ullrich. He's a geologist, he's not a market-side guy, really. But if you look at the insider filings on that company, Tom has bought a lot of stock. He puts his money where his mouth is, which always gets some extra respect from me. He thinks his own stock is undervalued. There's only so many that will put their money where their mouth is and step up and buy their stock on the market, which he's done many times in the last year.

Goldfinger: I met with Tom in November in Palm Beach and I was impressed by his presentation. Obviously, you can only tell the story as it is. And in November, it wasn't a fantastic story because they were going to have to raise money and stock was at $.05. It definitely caught my attention in the last few weeks and I think a lot of guys have put BAY back on their radar.

Eric Coffin: I think, like most geos, he's probably a little too paranoid about the whole “someone's going to claim jump me” thing. It's not like you're in the western U.S. on BLM land where some guy can just go and lay stake around you. I mean, anybody that wants to get ground there has to do the same thing as him, which is a long and involved negotiation with a logging company.

His sense of the guys that he's negotiating with, they're not the kind of guys that are going to turn around because some guy showed up the next day and offers 10% more. They're just not going to do that. I, personally, think he's being a little too paranoid about talking about this stuff. And it's frustrating for me, as someone that owns a bunch of it and that follows it in the newsletter, that there is no little public data to look at. Can we get some maps and stuff, Tom? Can we get some sense of scale? That's why I'm almost looking forward to the land agreements as much as the assays because with the land agreements, I think he'll finally be comfortable enough to say, “Okay, here's the full target. Here's the geophysics, etc.”

I know the target's actually a kilometer and a half, and he thinks it's probably open. That's why he's expanding the land position so much. People can't get their heads around that if he's not putting this stuff out, which he's just not going to do until he has this land agreement.

Goldfinger: Really interesting insights about Aston Bay, Eric. It’s on my radar here and I’ll be following the next couple of NRs from them closely.

HRA-Coffin Interview today

https://ceo.ca/@goldfinger/eric-coffin-on-junior-mining-masochism-the-chinaus-trade-war-and-the-endgame-for-the-gold-sector