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0:10 Okay. All right. Fair warning, I'm an engineer, so this is going to go in a different direction perhaps. If you have... Personal? Just witnessing? No, no, no, that's perfect. Yeah, we don't get to do our work until the GEOs find something, so we have to work together. So that's all good. So I'm Garrett McDonald, CEO of Maritime Resources. Happy to give you an update today on our projects in Newfoundland and Labrador. Just like Roger before me, we're working in this great jurisdiction. We've been very busy the last few years developing a gold project with very high grades. We've put together an entire mining package from mine to mill to tailings that is completely permitted in a very high grade open pit mine.
0:56 So we'll talk to you about that, what our plans are in the near future and some of the exploration opportunities that we like to actually grow the resource, grow the mine life, and add value to the story. This is an interesting shot, actually. This is our facility at the Point Rouse Project in Newfoundland and Labrador, where we just did an acquisition back in September of last year. We acquired this asset from a company called Signal Gold. It was up for sale. We had looked at it for a couple of years. It's a fully permitted 1,300 ton a day process plant with a large in-pit tailings facility there. You can see the light-colored pond. That's an old open-pit mine that's been converted into a tailings facility. And on the front of the screen there is actually a contractor that's mining the waste rock from the old open-pit mine.
1:46 And they're producing an aggregate product. They crush it, they wash it, they actually put it on a ship, Panamax-sized vessels, and they go down to Florida, they offload, and they've recently started shipping this rock down to Guyana, of all places. So pretty interesting facility. You can imagine, too, with the dock space that's here, it opens up opportunities for us to maybe export concentrates or materials from this dock or import feed for the mill. Okay, cautionary statement, read at your leisure please. A Little summary on maritime. Like I said, we're in Newfoundland and Labrador. It's the best jurisdiction that I've ever worked in. I've, as an engineer, I've worked in a few different places around the world and around Canada. I was involved with Placer Dome, a Gold Company a long time ago.
2:34 Got involved in narrow vein mining. I did some open pit mining as well up in Fort McMurray. So I've got experience moving some big mines and big operations where we moved over 1.1 million tons per day at a mine up in Fort McMurray. So my background is a little bit in each of the camps, underground and open pit. What we've been looking at here is the Hammer Down Gold Project. And this is a project that was mined actually back in the early 2000s by a company called Richmont. Richmont was eventually acquired by Alamos a few years ago. We've looked at it as an open pit mine. We did a feasibility study on it in 2022. We came up with a very nice open pit plan, reserve grade, diluted reserve grade of 4.5 grams per ton.
3:22 We actually own 2 processing plants in the province. We own the only 2 gold processing plants in Newfoundland and Labrador currently. Caliber mining, used to be known as Marathon, is building the third one. So that gives us a lot of flexibility and I'll explain a little bit more in a second. Our initial capital to build the Hammerdown project was estimated at 75 million Canadian. We think that number will actually come down with the newly acquired mill that we purchased in September, which is more complete. It was running about 12 months ago. We don't think we need a lot of extra capital to restart that mine. So what we have here is a very nice 50,000 ounce a year producer with an all in sustaining costs, probably around $1,000 US. So you can do the math, that's a lot of free cash flow.
4:08 And for a small company, that's really helpful. We can look at using that to grow the company from there. We've got great shareholders. We just recently added Firefly Metals. I'll explain why in a minute. They're a $400 million Australian copper company. They have a gold project in Ontario as well. But they're our next door neighbors. They acquired a company called Rambler Metals and Mining at a receivership last year. And we've also got a toll milling agreement set up with Newfound Gold to look at, potentially, toll milling some of their Queensway material at our Pine Cove mill. So this is Newfoundland, the island, and it's very busy. There's a lot going on. There's been a few changes. Down on the southern end of the island, you've got Big Ridge Gold with about 1.4 million ounces down there. Matador Mining is exploring the Cape Ray project.
4:58 Calibre took over Marathon Gold is in completing that project. They're about halfway through construction. That's a 200,000 ounce a year mine. Over to the northeast, you've got Newfound Gold, you've got Labrador Gold, you've got exploits, all along that exciting new discovery. And then up in the northern part there, where we've got Firefly and Maritime, that's called the Bayvert Mining District. So that's a very old mining camp. It's been active since the 1800s. They've been mining there a long time. This is a little closer view of the Bayvert District. In blue are the properties that we have. So down in the southwest corner, that's the Hammerdown Gold Project. We've got about 450 square kilometres of property here in Newfoundland, which is a fair amount.
5:47 What we've shown here is some of the major assets in the area. There's literally 3 process plants. There's 2 gold plants, and there's 1 copper concentrator in 2 ports, so that means there's a lot of infrastructure. The people that live in these communities generally work in the mining industry. Last year in 2003, 2 mines closed in this district. The Point Rouse project shut down and the Rambler mine closed. There was 400 direct jobs that were lost last year. Now the people that worked in those mines, they didn't move away, they're still there. They may be traveling, they may be commuting 2 weeks in, 2 weeks out to different projects, but they still live there. So there's a lot of skilled workers available. When we or Firefly or both companies restart these mines, the labor force is available. And there's one thing that Newfoundlanders love, they wanna come home. They don't wanna work away. And I've got examples of guys that have worked for me, or are working for me now, that spent 2 weeks in, 2 weeks out for 25 to 30 years rotating through mines across Canada, literally missing half of their children's life. So that's not very good.
6:55 If there's an opportunity to work from home, be home every night, then They're very interested. So our business model is fairly simple. Maybe a little different than some other junior companies that you'll see. We've focused all of our efforts, mainly all of our efforts on getting this mine up and running to generate cash flow. So over the last few years, we've steadily progressed from a PEA stage through environmental assessment, through acquiring existing assets that are in the area, to getting fully permitted, and now we're looking at financing to bring the mine into production. A little different than maybe other junior companies that are really focused on exploration. We have that potential, but we've made the decision to focus on cash flow. So over this time, it's come together really nicely, and I'll show you some of the key assets that we acquired.
7:46 This is a view of the Hammerdown project. So this is the mine and the intent here is to produce kind of an upgraded concentrate product that would get trucked about an hour away to the process plant that we own. It's called Pine Cove. At this mine here, we were able to get through an environmental assessment in about 8 months. It was provincial only. We had no federal triggers. We had no federal involvement. It was actually designed federal free. I wanted to get t-shirts made up that said federal free. That's an important note. And we did it. We actually had no federal involvement in this project. So there's a few ways we did it. We had no species at risk. We had no bats. We had community involvement early on, so they understood what was happening. There's no acid rock drainage. And this was a mine once before. It was a brownfields mine. So when Richemont was here, very high-grade mine, half an ounce per ton.
8:38 But Richemont was, they were a pure mining company. They would come in, they'd mine out assets for a few years, and they'd go to the next one, go to the next one. They didn't do a lot of exploration, so they left behind a pretty valuable resource here. In their defence, gold prices back in the early 2000s were maybe $300, $400 an ounce, so certainly much different now. They were running small underground mine with about an 8.5 gram per ton cut off. We're looking something less than 1 gram, about 0.7 grams per ton is our cut off. So what happens here, we mine the veins. These are a series of vertical high grade narrow veins. We have over 110 of them. And they're kind of stacked in together like pages in a book, but they're vertical which is really nice. We will send them here to the crushing plant, they go through an x-ray sorting plant which actually concentrates the sulfides into a high-grade product, leaving behind the rejects which could be used for construction aggregate.
9:34 That's a view of Hammerdown. We've done the site clearing already. This was actually a very simple exercise to do. That's the old mine there. There was a small starter pit before they went underground. And the starter pit average grade was about 21 grams per ton. So this is a very high grade ore body. What you've seen there cleared is basically the footprint of the ultimate open pit. We have no neighbors. We have good road access. The power line for the project is only about 300 metres away on the highway, so great infrastructure. Here's another view of the project. This is our feasibility study showing gold production, and you'll notice some of the grades here are fantastic. We'll upgrade the run-of-mine feed to a grade of about 7 grams per ton.
10:22 We'll truck that at a rate of 700 tons a day to the mill. We'll process it. We'll get about 50,000 ounces per year. All in sustaining cost, just over $900 per ounce. Fantastic economics and initial capital of about 75 million. Now, as I mentioned, this is with our first mill. We were going to a second mill that we acquired back in September, which is a much, we'll call it more recent operating plant. It only shut down about a year ago. It's been on care maintenance since then. I don't think it's gonna take a lot to turn it back on. That initial capital cost, instead of 75 million, might be closer to 60 million. That's my opinion. So we're looking at that right now, just confirming everything. Ore sorting, you've probably heard about this. In fact, we did a lot of test work here in Germany with our material. We actually shipped ore from the Hammerdown mine in Newfoundland to Germany to do a series of bulk sample testing.
11:15 This is very similar to what we had at the Dalradian project in Northern Ireland, very similar to ore bodies actually. And this involves just basically using x-rays and compressed air to separate sulfides from the waste rock. So it's very effective at doing that. And the big benefit here is that we reduce the amount of rock that we have to truck and process. So we save a lot on cost and we save a lot on greenhouse gas emissions. Some of the sorting plants here actually qualify for government funding because it's a method of reducing our environmental impact. So there is government funding for these sorting plants. Here's a view of our Pine Cove mill complex. This is part of about a 40, I think it's about 45 square kilometer land package with 3 former open pit mines, a fully permitted 1300 ton a day mill.
12:09 Large capacity tailing storage facility there, good for about 4 million cubic meters of storage, which is more than 20 years of storage for our needs at the moment. It's a great asset to have. And on the coast here is a port facility run by kind of one of our partner companies, Shoreline Aggregates. These are the guys that are sending rock down to Florida and Guyana. One of the interesting things that has happened is as they were mining the waste rock from the former mine, they're washing it, they're crushing it, they're washing it, and in the process they're actually recovering gold at the bottom of their wash plant. That gold belongs to Maritime. So it's a great way to repurpose waste rock. We're reducing the environmental liability of the site daily and we're recovering gold in the process.
12:57 Speaking of gold, we actually, after taking ownership of the plant, which had already been through a mill cleanup. Gold is a funny thing because it's heavy and it can get squished and stuck in small places. We actually recovered over 280 ounces of gold from our own cleanup. We went back and tried to clean it up again. We've got some additional material that we've sent out to a smelter. So I estimate we should get about a million dollars of value just from cleaning up the mill. So this was pretty exciting. We did all this work ourselves and we had a really good team there in Newfoundland. Another view of the port, Panamax ships, they haul, you know, 75,000 tons a shot down the eastern coast.
13:43 Like I said before, this could be a really neat opportunity to either export copper concentrate from the nearby copper mine, which we did a deal recently with Firefly Metals. They became an equity owner of Maritime to the tune of about 8.4% in return for future access to the port, which is a great idea. This port can be expanded. We are actually looking at doing that with Shoreline. It could mean that we have the ability to import different products to process at this facility. This could be kind of a long-term kind of destination for metallurgical work and processing and tailing storage. Couple notes on exploration. We've got 2 focuses. 1, of course, is to grow the resource. You look back at that little production graph I had, and that's a snapshot in time of about a five-year mine life. That's not a long mine life, but we have opportunities to expand it. Close to the mine site and close to the mill, there are several targets that could add, I think it probably double that mine life, get us up to about 10 years.
14:47 Since we are a small company, we can't do everything at once. We focused almost exclusively on getting this package ready to go. Mine, mill, permitting, everything's together. Now we're going to turn our attention to adding to the mine life and also testing a few of these brand new, maybe discovery potential targets that we have in the area. This is a view of our southern property down by our main asset, the Hammerdown project on the right side of the screen. So as you can notice, what's happening along this property, there's major fault structures that have come through here. And where these fault structures generally meet, this is pretty common around the world, you get mineralization that comes up. So these are orogenic gold deposits, quartz veins generally.
15:34 To the west, you see something called the Bayvert-Brompton line there on the west side of the page, and the Whiskervalley-El Strado area. These are 2 targets and they're large, measuring, you know, a couple of kilometres by 2 or 3 kilometres. They are carbon copy lookalikes to our main hammerdown asset, and we've got no drilling in these targets. We've sampled them on surface. You can walk around on the quartz veins, but we have not drilled them. That's one of our targets this year, is to go and drill these things. Down in the southwest corner is more of a VMS target. Another one that's brand new. It cost us $290 to stake that claim. This was a property we kept around for a while. You can walk around and pick up grades of up to 10% copper, 200 grams of silver on surface in a giant area.
16:25 And again, no drilling has ever been done in here. So this is all kind of brand new. And as I mentioned, we've been focusing on the production cash flow story for such a long time, but now we're stepping back to look at these other targets to see what we have. So actually at the mine site itself, the Hammerdown project, you can see the Hammerdown deposit, but we have potential, I think, for probably at least another 2 open pits within the mine footprint. In the southwest corner, something called the Orion Zone, this is a similar looking deposit to Hammerdown, a little bit different in some of the mineralization is more disseminated. Okay, so there's probably another open pit here. This deposit is open at depth. It could be an underground component, needs some more drilling. This would be an amendment to our existing permit. So not something that's very hard to add to our mine permit, it's quite simple.
17:15 And to the northeast of the Hammerdown project, where we've got some additional gold veins. We've got that green kind of shape there, and that's a VMS zone, which often comes in the footwall of the gold zones. So it's zinc-rich. Zinc and silver are the 2 main elements in that one. And we never really considered it because we did not own a process plant that could take it. The original 1 we had was a whole ore leach circuit at Nugget Pond. That's not set up for any base metals at all, but the mill we just acquired in September has a flotation circuit, it has a port. We could make kind of a gold-rich concentrate there. So suddenly this has become interesting and we've got a mill to handle it. So potential here for at least another 2 open pits, which I think is pretty interesting.
18:05 This is a view of the land package around the Pine Cove mill. So about an hour away from our main asset, this is the Pine Cove project here. So the mill is down in this kind of the lower left corner. And there's a couple of targets here that we have a lot of interest in. The previous company I think was focused on another project they had in Nova Scotia, so these ones really didn't get a lot of attention. Of course the gold price is now higher so they're more interesting. For instance, beneath the Pine Cove Mine, which is adjacent to our mill, the zone actually continues below the open pit. We re-sampled, we went in and actually sampled some of the core again, where core often was not sampled completely. Anyway, we come up with over 107 meters of 1.3 grams. So that tells you that system continues at depth. We're not sure what it means yet. We're going to do some more work and understand it a bit better, but potentially an open pit target or if it holds together nicely, it could be a very thick underground target.
19:06 At the Deer Grove Project, which is up in the north, that's an old Naranda Mines prospect. They went underground on this target back in the 80s. They ramped in about 500 metres, pulled out some very high-grade veins, and I think it just wasn't big enough for them, so they left. But what they did do, which is really interesting, is they drilled kind of the intersection of 2 veins, and where they meet, you get a bit of a bulge. And 6.9 grams over 25 metres, and that's only about 25 metres below the surface, so really nice open-pit target up there. Lots of gold shoins, but no resource, no extra work. So, we're going to look at that one. We're looking for sources of feed that can come down into the mill. There's a number of other targets throughout here, but it's just a great area to work. We can drive to every place. We can work 24 hours a day. We can work 365 days a year. It does get a lot of snow, but it doesn't get that cold. So it might be...the coldest in the wintertime might be, you know, minus 20, minus 30.
20:04 That sounds warm. That's not too bad. It's the wind. If it's windy, then you get a problem. But anyway, it's a great area to work. Lastly, one of the things that we've done a lot as a company is we focused on engaging with the kids in the local towns. In Newfoundland especially, being an island, being kind of a very rural community
