Adelong Gold Limited announced that the Company is preparing plans for drilling at Caledonian with the view to target potential extensions to that deposit. The Company also plans to initiate drilling at the Sawpit deposit that would assess the potential for generating a maiden resource at that project. Given the success of the recent program of drilling at Gibraltar that confirmed wide zones of mineralisation, the Company remains optimistic, and is advancing its plans to target further drilling that has the potential to expand resources. Caledonian: Subject to confirming that government approvals for drilling granted in April 2021 for Caledonian remain current, an additional 2-3 drill holes will also be considered during this program. This would aim to test the northern extension to mineralisation identified in the 2022 program with the northern most drill hole
3DCAL009 intersecting 6metres @ 6.68g/tAu before hitting 4m of old workings which presumably extracted the higher grade component of the deposit. The 2022 drilling at Caledonian gave a much clearer picture of the nature of mineralisation at the Caledonian deposit and there are low gold grades at surface with all the surface holes generating gold grades less than 1g/tAu. This has been interpreted as a depletion zone of 30-40m depth below surface but with an associated supergene enrichment below. This will help target drilling at Caledonian in the future. This depletion zone is interpreted to be present in all the low lying areas north of the Challenger Deposit. The Challenger deposit, Caledonian Deposit and Fletchers workings lie on a major shear structure that traverses this entire low lying area. While there were many shallow holes drilled in this zone in search of deposits, very few had the depth that would have intersected commercial grades. The extent of drilling in this roughly 1km zone. The yellow triangles represent the drilling completed in 2022
and both the northernmost and southernmost holes in this program generated commercial grades. A review of all this historical drilling is underway in order to identify the exact position of the mineralised
zone with a view to undertaking deeper drilling in 2023 to explore this zone for additional resources. Sawpit: Sawpit is the southernmost deposit in a line of workings that can be traced for around 3km. Historical
gold production from this group of mines was relatively small as grades tended to be sub-economic for mining by old timers. Sawpit had recorded production of around 2,500oz and Lady Mary recorded
production of only 4,500oz of gold. However, drilling at Sawpit and mapping of old shafts/workings show multiple veins and reasonably wide widths of mineralisation. Only the Sawpit deposit has been drilled to relatively shallow depths and as seen in the two cross sections, representing drilling over 25m either side of the section line, there are multiple intersections. The proposed drilling at Sawpit would involve 5 drill holes designed to confirm earlier work, test the deposits at depth and provide some infill holes that would better define the mineralisation. This line of mineralisation between Sawpit and Lady Mary has been poorly explored. The drilling at Sawpit shows widths and grades that would potentially be commercial and some historic mapping of old workings along this line shows some of the other deposits on this line such as Lady Mary were working
multiple veins. Excessive rainfalls over the past two years has also led to several shafts west of the New Chum deposit collapsing that were hitherto unrecorded and their proximity to historical alluvial workings at "Nuggetty Gully" provide a further target for future exploration. This underexplored area has potential to generate several resources and a program of evaluation to generate drill targets is planned for 2023. A preliminary orientation geochemical soil sampling survey is planned following the drilling program to assess the effectiveness of this style of exploration in this area. This technique is seen as the best approach to defining drill targets in the higher ground. However, given the experience at Caledonian there may be depletion in grades in the lower lying areas and options for using geophysics are under review.