The Whirling Dervish deposit is located 1km to the North of the Carosue Dam processing plant. The ore zone is of considerable width (25-30m) and grades above 2g/t. The open pit provides a low cost mill feed source very close to the processing facilities. Whirling Dervish and Porphyry will be mined concurrently at the re-commencement of operations planned for the first quarter 2010.
The current published resource at Whirling Dervish is 520,000oz, with a stage 1 open-pit reserve of 217,000oz. As is the case with Porphyry, Whirling Dervish is highly leveraged to the gold price, with significant increases to optimal pit shell sizes at higher gold prices. The current resource is open at depth and laterally and is only constrained by drilling. Resource definition drilling is planned to determine the underground potential of the deposit at depth.
Much of the infrastructure required for mining, such as the contractor lay down area and re-fuelling facilities are still in situ from the mining of the adjacent Karari deposit (closer to the plant).
