Forest Hill adds zest to Seabright’s potential

Underground development work at Seabright Resources Inc.’s gold property here is advancing rapidly to put ore reserves into the proven category.

While an investment research report by Levesque, Beaubien Inc. of Montreal estimates Seabright’s earnings per share will be 14 cents in 1987, that report does not include production potential from the Forest Hill property. Seabright plans to be mining a minimum of 100 tons a day from here by May, 1987.

The earnings estimates were based on an average gold price of $350(US) an ounce. Seabright estimates total production costs on this and its Beaver Dam property will be in the $160-$170(US) range for each ounce of gold produced.

Underground development work there is in transition. Cementation, a Britain-based mine contractor, (which is also driving the ventilation raise on the Rogers Pass tunnelling project in B.C.) is preparing to pull out of Canada. It will be replaced at Forest Hill by J.S. Redpath.

The equipment and infrastructure they leave behind on the project — a headframe, a hoist, compressors, drills, loaders and mine cars — will be a big asset to Seabright. Just by coincidence, a provincial power line also crosses the property.

Development work to date includes a 230-m shaft (the first for gold mining in Nova Scotia since the 1930s), and 800 m of cross cuts and drifting on the 200-m level along four linear gold-bearing quartz vein packages dipping nearly vertical and spaced from 6.5 m to 16 m apart.

In just 200 m of drifting on one of the packages, sightings of visible gold indicate chip samples, which are currently out for assay, should give grades at or above the 0.29 oz gold per ton indicated to date, according to senior project geologist Kenneth Adams. Assays are prepared by Chem Lab in Sai nt John, N.B.

“We cannot prove reserves until we have proven continuity of the zone vertically to the 155-m level,” Mr Adams says. Plans are to drive a raise to the 155-m level by the end of the year. Then some 100 m of additional drifting will be necessary to open up five-stopes which will satisfy minimum production requirements of 100 tpd. Preliminary Mine Plan

Although the exploration drifts here are driven 2 m wide, operations manager David B. Armstrong says mining widths will likely be in the order of 1.2-1.3 m. “This should minimize the amount of waste rock we take out, thus increasing mined grades substantially,” he says. While shrinkage stoping could be used, Armstrong suspects that two parallel cut and fill stopes (similar to those used in the upper portion of the Teck/Corona mine at Hemlo) with a captured scoop and drill, connected with a short crosscut for access between the two stopes is conceivable.

“With the existing hoisting equipment we could hoist a maximum of 250 tons a day from Forest Hill,” Armstrong says. A preliminary feasibility study last Februrary suggests production would be just 100 tons per day. The only bottleneck likely to arise would be in tramming ore to the ore pass since there is not a large storage bin for broken ore below the 200-m level. Conceivably, production could begin on the upper levels and ore could be stored in an ore pass planned between the 155-m level and the 200-m level.

It takes about 1 1/2 hours to haul ore to the Gays River mill.

On surface the company has stripped the eastern extension of the ore packages over a strike length of 100 m. Another completely separate zone located about 150 m south and 700 m east of the shaft recently returned channel sample assays of 6 g gold per ton over a width of 4 m.