JUNIOR MINING

Castle’s Ivey sees blue sky for gold in Ghana

An experienced Western Australian geologist and company manager, Michael Ivey, sees major targets for gold deposits in Ghana including areas where there is no evidence of any exploration.

PERTH - 

Michael Ivey who early this decade won the "Explorer of the Year" award by quarterly magazine Gold Mining Journal told Paydirt's Africa Down Under Conference in Perth today that drilling, trenching and field sampling work in Ghana will rapidly show up significant gold deposits.

Ivey, who heads new junior explorer Castle Minerals Ltd, told the conference he could not believe the raw potential in various parts of Ghana, including virginal targets relatively close to historic workings.

He said Castle (ASX: CDT) now had seven quality prospects including properties acquired post listing in May 2006.

What he liked about Ghana, apart from its geology, was that it had an English code of law, low sovereign risk and was already the world's 10^th largest gold producer and second largest in Africa after South Africa.

Castle has been a busy explorer, having gridded more than 700 line kilometres, dug 395 exploration pits and, in five programmes, completed more than 7.5 kilometres of drilling.

In the process it had discovered gold mineralisation in maiden drilling at Banso in the Ashanti Belt, Antubia in the Sefwi Belt and Sapelliga in the Bolgatanga Belt.

Castle is just launching fresh drill programmes at Akoka in the Ashanti Belt and at Antubia. Work at Akoka has shown a 3 km long anomaly that widens to over 500m at the intersection of a granite contact and a major NE trending cross structure.

Antubia is south west of Newmont Mining's big Ahafo gold mine and west of the Chirano mine and is in a perceived gold corridor 5.5 km long and between 1.5-2 km wide, and also open to the south. Latest drilling there included 11m @ 2.7 grams/tonne, 2m @ 5.53 g/t and 1m @ 9.1 g/t gold.