Currie Rose Resources‘ (CUI, TSX-V) Mabale Hills Project is located in the heart of the renowned Lake Victoria Greenstone Belt in northwest Tanzania, surrounded by some major mines and deposits including AngloGold‘s multi-million ounce Geita open-pit operation. There’s no denying the geological potential of Mabale Hills which is why Currie Rose’s current drill program at Sisu River has us so excited – the chance of a significant discovery is very real. And news could come almost any day.
Currie Rose announced, toward the end of today’s trading session, that 14 holes and nearly 1500 metres of drilling have been completed to date at Sisu River, 8 kilometres northeast of the company’s Mwamazengo discovery. “Good source rocks have been intersected beneath the ‘mbuga’ clays and assays from initial holes are pending.” The assay lab Currie Rose is using is less than an hour’s drive from Mabale Hills, so initial results could come very quickly – drilling started over 3 weeks ago and CUI has delivered results within a month before.
Currie Rose got really fired up over Sisu River after a discovery at the property by artisanal miners in the fall of last year. The company’s geologist, who has a long and very successful track record in Tanzania, collected random grab samples from the discovery area and got grades as high as 89 g/t Au. The current Phase 1 reverse circulation drill program is focused on an area (150 m x 30 m) that was extensively prospected near-surface by these local miners, and drilling will test the extent of Gold mineralization to depths between 100 and 125 metres. The Sisu River target is hosted within felsic volcanic rocks, considered to be highly prospective for Gold mineralization in greenstone belts.
Currie Rose’s very first hole at Mwamazengo in 2005 intersected 32 metres near-surface (4 metres to 36 metres) grading 3.70 g/t Au – more stellar results followed that. Will we see a repeat of that success at Sisu River? Anything’s possible – the geological environment is ideal.
We expect Sisu River and Mwamazengo to generate a lot of excitement in the year ahead. But those two properties are just part of the Currie Rose equation. The company is soon starting a large amount of pre-drilling work at its massive Sekenke Gold Project, approximately 200 kilometres southeast of Mabale Hills. This land package runs in between and surrounds two former producing mines from the first half of the 1900’s – Sekenke and Kirondatal. As Osisko, Gold Bullion and many others have found out, the best place to find a new mine is near an old mine – the Sekenke Project has incredible potential as Currie Rose outlined in its news release today:
“Recent exploration by Currie Rose has identified a highly prospective structure (12 km x 800 m) within a shear zone on the margins of a large granite intrusion that hosts numerous quartz reefs of the same type that developed at the nearby former mines.”
The quartz reef structure that Currie Rose has discovered is actually significantly larger than those which were outlined at the former high grade mines.
“The potential of the identified quartz reefs in the shear zone (extending from the former Sekenke mine) to host high grade gold is indicated by the encouraging assays returned for rock chip samples and also by the fact that highly anomalous gold grades were obtained from streams that drain the target structure. The coarse grained gold that is currently panned from the streams by artisanal miners is assumed to have been derived from the nearby shear zone (probably from the quartz reefs hosted within it).”
We first brought Currie Rose to the attention of BMR readers when it was trading at a dime in September. We added it to the BMR Portfolio in late October at 16 cents.
Currie Rose has a terrific chance to become the next Gold Bullion Development (GBB, TSX-V) in the BMR Portfolio. We made the right call with GBB in December of last year, with the company making a very significant discovery at Granada, and we believe Currie Rose could be on the verge of doing the same at Sisu River and elsewhere on its large land holdings in Tanzania. CUI is getting aggressive and that’s great news for long-time shareholders who have been waiting for this day when the company turned things up a few notches to unlock the value of its East African Gold assets.
Harold Smith has been President of this company for nearly 20 years and people are saying he has a fire in his belly right now that they’ve never seen before. His quote in today’s Currie Rose release was very telling:
“We’re extremely excited with the opportunities we have in front of us with our projects in the mining-friendly jurisdiction of Tanzania,” stated Smith. “We have a strong team on the ground there who know the country extremely well. We intend to take full advantage of this positive environment for gold and advance our Tanzanian projects with more vigor than ever going forward and throughout 2011.”
You can tell we see something very special in Currie Rose. But don’t just take our word for it. As always, do your own due diligence and understand the risks involved with all speculative plays such as this. We like to look at the risk-reward ratio. At current levels (the stock closed at 22 cents today), the upside potential in our view far outweighs the downside risk – especially given the very bullish outlook for Gold and junior exploration companies in general.
(As a matter of disclosure, this writer holds a position in Currie Rose – 270,000 shares).
