To: Chuca Marsh who wrote (187 ) 11/23/1998 12:47:00 PM From: richard badauskas Read Replies (2) | Respond to
I was in this stock several years ago and got out while it was still above a dollar. Wasted an awful lot of time looking at the geology and examining the production, got to know the Bretts and met with them and management once. The Table Mountain Property and lands to the North seemed to have great potential, BUT if you review the history of the veins Cusac mined from, ALL OF THEM started with high grades but quickly ran out to uneconomic material, this explains why for several years Cusac was able to mine in a stop- start fashion about 10,000 to 20,000 ozs per year. When the stock was trading above a dollar I understood that they had several hundred thousand ounces of mineable economic rock with production costs (as stated at the time) of around $175 per oz. None of this was manageable/verifiable and the mine quickly ran up losses. They can still manage small amounts of production from a few areas, but in my opinion these amounts will not support an ongoing viable operation. The property has had a lot of holes drilled thru it, in fact at one stage when production ground to a halt they fired their senior geologist and said that his work was not up to standard. This guy had worked on the property for years and really had built up a great amount of knowledge about the vein systems, so I thought if he couldn't figure it out the veins were too patchy. I took some of the data to another Vancouver mining co. and the CEO told me that long term production from Table Mountain was not viable, this has been borne out by the facts. There may be some hope on the Taurus property to the North but at MUCH higher gold prices. I think that we can all safely walk away from this one and keep our bank balances intact.
