Pirate Gold: $13.6 Million Financing Fuels Exploration at Treasure Island

0:17Trevor Hall: All right, everybody, welcome back to New Orleans and the New Orleans Investment Conference 2026. Going to touch base with one of our current partners, and that is Pirate Gold. They trade on the Venture Exchange with YARR and on the OTCQB with YARRF. The company has recently closed a new financing of$13.6 million. We're going to talk about that and putting the capital to work with CEO, Mr. Dennis Laviolette. Danny, welcome back. Well, thank you very, very much for having me back. It's nice to be here in beautiful Louisiana, New Orleans. NOLA, yarring it up, pirating it up. Actually, it's a pretty good place to be yarring.

0:58It's an amazing place to be yarring. You know, it's funny. We're just walking in this morning. I had a guy. He had our swag on, a T-shirt, taking a picture, a selfie with the booth. And him and his wife watch all the episodes of the show. Oh, cool. Yeah, it was really, really cool. So it's nice to meet people. That's fun, man.

1:18Trevor Hall: Very good. Well, I know you're usually talking to Michael McRae, who covers the story. I'm going to do my best Michael McRae and fill in for him here. But let's do talk about that$13 million. Yeah. It was flow through, correct? Yeah. Okay. So putting that to work, that gets you through most of 2027, it sounds like. Yeah. It's going to carry us into 2020, you know, through the rest of 26, obviously, and into 27. I'm not sure how far deep into 27 it's going to go. The burn rate now is about$2 million a month. We're sitting about 18, you know, in the chamber now, thanks to this being closed out. Obviously, I pay less fees and all those things that come with raising this kind of capital.

2:03You know, the project, it's all systems go. The issue is we just needed to bridge time. We didn't want to be spending hard dollars on flow-throughable things and need a little bit more flow-through for that stuff, you know, for the drills.

2:17Trevor Hall: Do you feel like you have the funds you need to tackle Treasure Island? Absolutely. I mean, Treasure Island as a whole, maybe not, but certainly Crippleback. So what that's going to do for us is it's going to buy the time for us to get all these summer holes that we drilled throughout the summer and the fall out to market. Hopefully that can result in some sort of re-rate on our discovery at Crippleback and particularly at Moby Dick. and it's just such a long lead time, right? With these big copper holes, you have to wait forever to get everything assayed, etc. So it's going to buy a little bit of a time for that to all come out and then notwithstanding, obviously, press forward.

2:59The goal here being able to be able to shape out a volume and some grades on that Moby Dick initial discovery and then we've got Coronation and Clipper Brook, which are lookalike zones that we've worked up and are drilling actually Coronation. We just started this week. So we're 40 meters deep into the first hole at Coronation, which is one of my favorite areas. And it's a total clone of what we see at Moby Dick. Okay, interesting.

3:29Trevor Hall: How are you going to divide up this capital with all these kind of like sub-projects going on? Because it is, you know, obviously you've got Treasure Island, as you mentioned, broken into Moosehead and Crippleback. Moosehead follows the Valentine Lake Fault, right? And you call that the most advanced. Is that going to continue to get the most resources towards it? Well, no, it won't. And the reason for that is because it's had historically the most resources put towards it. And it's in a place now where we can pretty much shape out, I think, a resource on Moosehead and advance it through the permitting process.

4:09I think that's where we're going to go with the moosehead stuff. There's a lot to do with moosehead. Like we could still lean into discovery and growth and try to put a little bit more meat on the bone over there. Again, though, the cost of discovery, drilling out sort of narrow vein, high grade, origenic stuff is quite a bit different than when you're drilling like 800 meters or 600 meters of mineralized copper gold porphyry down at Crippleback. And so Crippleback's interesting because it's a swarm, right? So any of these big corp, you know, we talk about Crippleback, it's 32 kilometers by seven and a half kilometers.

4:51And there's a sort of a swarm of these porphyry lookalike porphyry epithermal systems in there, hot spots. And Moosehead was, or Moby Dick, I should say, was the first one of those. So we're in a position where we can get Moosehead quite advanced to like where we can have a pretty confident volumetric and grade estimate on that i think and um the nice thing with those things as you may well know is that you don't have to needle them out like you know at 30 meter centers or 50 meter centers like you can really step out and be generous with the step outs and and uh you know it's it's a huge volume of rock so there's not a lot of wiggle room in grade and and stuff that you get in that so it's a lot more homogenous material okay so um you can really build tons fast um with that kind of a story so moby dick it's about shaping that out and then all these other look-alike zones to moby dick within the crippleback intrusive suite um if we can just you know get that first pass test work done on each one of those things to say okay do we have another moby dick and another moby dick so somebody can get the calculator and do the math once we have moby dick quantified well as you

5:57Trevor Hall: No, and I do want to stick around and talk about Moby Dick some more because no pirate is any good without a ship. And you don't have a ship. You have to bring in a barge. A big barge. A big barge to drill. This is quite interesting. Very fascinating story when it comes to exploration. So you brought in this barge. It sounds like you started drilling the beginning of October? Yeah. Okay. Can you give us an update of how that's going, where you're at? Barge is going beautifully well. so it looks like we're going to be lucky with the barge to be able to drill it on it up until December we hope is sort of like the range on where we can go with that barge once the real winter sets in and the snow flies real hard it'll probably be not as feasible but for now we're getting as much barge work as we can and it's been going swimmingly we've been putting holes right where we want to be putting them as we step out across this thing the problem with Crippleback Lake being with Moby Dick, that zone sitting right under, mostly under the lake, sort of like half of it's sort of under the lake, the other half's not.

6:59But when we first found it, we were limited to the edge of the lake and you're intersecting that mineralization super deep. So now with the barge, you know, you're right on top drilling right down. So you're getting, you're into the mineralization right away. Yeah. Which is nice. And so.

7:14Trevor Hall: Has this been done before? Oh yeah. Oh yeah? Okay. Like this is a first for me. Yeah, we were barge drilling at Youth Found Gold too. Oh, were you? Yeah, because there's a lot of swampy, marshy ground, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. People think lake and, you know, it's bad. It's not, though. Like, the whole island's covered in swampy, marshy bogs. But you've got to keep this thing real stable. Like, it can't deviate. Yeah, it's got these spuds. So, historically, so when we were doing it at Newfound, we had a different setup a bit. We would, like, anchor it with cables to the shore and then to stabilize it and then be able to drill.

7:49Now with this rig, we've got these spud legs. So you just extend the spuds down into the dirt. Okay. Like into the bed of the lake. Man. And then that roots it in place, and then they can drill like crazy. So it's awesome.

8:02Trevor Hall: Did you put a pirate flag on the barge? We absolutely put a pirate flag. I know we're in person, and no one can see it, but I can show you the pirate flag. And it's epic. It looks like it's the coolest looking barge. That's pretty amazing. Okay. Let's talk about just following up on that discovery hole. it returned 0.54 % copper equivalent over 118 meters, right? So real decent hit here. What do you need to hit here to keep not only showing scale here, but more economically viable grade? Well, first off, I think that is very economically viable grade. I think when you're hitting 50 meters of, or 180 meters of 0.7, or even that 50 meters of a percent and a half, that is exactly what you're looking for inside of one of these big things.

8:47I mean, you know, a lot of these big porphyry copper deposits out in the world would be thrilled to have a 50 meter zone of a percent and a half equivalent. The key here is to drive economics is the consistency on that background. So like, are we going to be continuously drilling? What you really want is like an ocean of like 0.2 or better material, right? That's the playbook. So you want like a quarter billion or half a billion tons, I think is the dream, of like 0.2 material. And then you'd have like, let's say, 50 million tons or 100 million tons of that 1 % plus material. That's your payback zone.

9:29And so then obviously the geometry of that matters. But with these big copper things, the payback zones allow for those large CapEx projects to get a quick payback. And then they can run forever on the lower grade material. And that's the way all these mines are architectured. So if you look at the big copper around the world, commonly that grade profile is in that 0.2 run rate range and the differentiator being the payback zones. So we are seeing like there is some larger copper things out there in that 0.4 range that don't have a rich payback zone and they're still sitting on mine today. So I think that the key here is just how much of that 1.5 % material do we have?

10:10and as we fence across Moby Dick, is it still consistently there throughout that blob, if you will.

10:19Trevor Hall: Is Moby Dick, do you see it today as more of a gold play or a copper play? You're talking a lot about the copper here. It's 50-50. So if you look in the background stuff, it's pretty much 50-50 copper gold. In the high grade, so when you get into that real high grade, gold carries the day. So then it becomes about two-thirds gold, one-third copper in that real high grade. Now, that can change, though. You know, we've seen intervals where the inverse is true. So I think the verdict is still out on, is this going to be predominantly copper, predominantly gold? But I think on mass, as you look at the entirety of the volume, we think it's mostly copper, and the sweet spots have a lot more gold.

11:06But gold and copper are ubiquitous through the whole thing, as well as silver.

11:09Trevor Hall: Okay. So it's getting a lot of attention here. Where does that leave Moosehead going forward? Do you start pivoting sometime as the seasons change or what does it look like? Yeah, exactly. So Moosehead's right beside the highway, right beside town. So it's real easy in the wintertime. And again, I don't see us doing a ton more drilling there for now. I think there's a lot of shots we could take on Moosehead, go deeper, do a few just to see. But I think, and then there's some adjacent stuff that we found that was really exciting and we could flesh out. But I think really where I could see Moosehead going is probably looking to engage in that resource estimation process.

11:52And then de-risking that asset and get it shovel ready. So how fast can we get Moosehead into production? That's kind of like at this point, because between you and I, I can't say the numbers because I actually don't know the numbers. But even if I was just to guess, let's assume there's, I don't know, a half a million good ounces. Right. It doesn't matter if it's a half a million or if it's 400 ,000 or 700 ,000 or a million. It really doesn't matter. And if you if you doubled that number, it wouldn't matter either. because with these orgenic things, you know, if they make money and they work with the low capex and high yield, you can just go ahead and start.

12:35That's what they do in Australia. That's what we did classically in the Abitibi for over a century. So you'd find, you know, just enough to say, okay, like this is worth building. You build it. And then like Hecla famously does replace the ounces every year with, as they go deeper and they fence out the next horizon. And I think Moosehead's pretty effectively drilled down to about 300 meters right now. And that's good. I feel pretty good about that. Yeah, I feel good about that.

13:00Trevor Hall: All right, well, back in September, you and Mike did an interview. You actually talked about kind of taking Moosehead through resource and permitting on its own. And so I kind of want to follow up on that conversation. Whether you expect to, you mentioned maybe having finding milk capacity at your friends at Newfound. Is that something that's progressed to a decision of some sort? Have you started making those inwards with your old friends at Newfound? Not at all. Not at all, okay. Not at all, and the reason being, I don't think we need to. I think that's only a serious conversation that can be had with anybody when the resource is known and when the permit cycle and everything is understood.

13:42Once the asset is actually in play, then those kind of things can be had, those conversations about where do we run this material through a third-party mill and everything. So I think the competitive tension will build on the asset once we de-risk it. And I don't think the ounces contained matter, given its location and the quality of the way it is right now.

14:06Trevor Hall: Do you have a timeline for that resource? I don't want to say, because it's something Greg and I and Tim have been talking about. I don't want to really stick a hard and fast deadline on that, but I'm aiming for next year, 27. Okay. So I'd say, I'd say like if I can get there and, you know, early to mid 27th. And then obviously the other reason just to caveat that is that you may start on that, that track of resources estimation. And then with that third party group, they say, Hey, listen, Denny, if you put in an extra 20 holes here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, we can go from this much in the measured, indicated this much in inferred.

14:44like your res cat optimization can be completely skewed over into a better position or you can pick up a lot more ounces if you you know filled in certain pieces and so i think i want to reserve um i want to reserve some some lat some uh you know bandwidth i don't know yeah some you know uh room to adjust that date accordingly depending on how that works yeah it makes sense that makes

15:10Trevor Hall: sense. Okay. Thanks so much. Good to see you. Thank you. Hopefully Mike's proud that we covered this and the way he would do it. Oh, this is so much better than with Mike. This is so much. No, I'm just kidding. Mike, we love you. Thank you. All right. All right, everybody. That's your update from Pirate Gold Corp again, trading on the venture with YARR and on the OTCQB with YARRF. The information presented should not be considered investment advice. Mining stock daily and its affiliates are not responsible for any loss arising from any investment decision in connection with the material presented herein.

15:41Trevor Hall: Please do your own research or speak with a licensed financial representative before making any investment decisions.