Mr Renaud Hinse president and CEO of Abcourt Mines Inc announced that the dewatering of the Elder mine located near Rouyn Noranda, Québec is making good progress. The water is now 18 meters below the ninth level at a depth of 400 meters from surface.

As we go deeper in the shaft, the volume of water to pump diminishes. If everything goes well, we expect to complete the dewatering of the mine by the end of March next. The mine has 14 levels developed, two not developed and the volume of water to pump at the beginning of the operation was estimated at 215 million US gallons. About 50 million US gallons remain to be pumped.

We have also been converting all the data from the English to metric system. As the Elder mine is a former producer, there is a substantial amount of historical data to convert into metric but we are making good progress. This information is needed to prepare a revised 43-101 resource estimate, which we expect to have completed at the end of March.