High-grade infill hits at Tuvatu — and the stock has already run

Lion One Metals drilled 4.6 metres grading 82.28 grams of gold per tonne — that’s about two and a half ounces of gold in every tonne of rock — at its Tuvatu underground mine in Fiji. That was the headline hole (TGC-0532), and it wasn’t alone. Of 34 holes in this program, 30 hit high grade. Other standouts: 1.0 m at 169.47 g/t, 1.1 m at 153.94 g/t, and 1.7 m at 93.94 g/t. The company reported the results on September 24, 2026.

Here’s the key: this is infill and grade-control drilling, not exploration. Lion One isn’t trying to make the deposit bigger — it’s drilling into and around workings it already has, on a tight 12.5-metre pattern, to firm up blocks of rock it can mine soon. The results sit within 25 metres of existing development, and the company plans to stope them within the next six months. The drilling spans two 100-metre targets along the UR1 and UR2 lodes, whose total strike (for UR2) runs about 620 metres; many of these holes fanned out from shared collars, so they’re a spread from single drill sites rather than separate points along the trend. One near-surface hit, TGC-0538, ran 3.0 m at 19.32 g/t starting just 1 metre down. On the multiplier that combines grade and thickness — gram-metres — the top hole scores 378, and several others clear 150, which is strong for this kind of nuggety alkaline system. CEO Ian Berzins knows operating mines; he grew Manitoba’s Rice Lake Mine from 10,000 to 80,000 ounces of gold a year. The stock has noticed: LIO.V rose 54.2% over three months while the junior gold index gained 24.3% and gold itself rose 7.6% — a company-specific jump that stepped up mid-period from about C$0.14 to C$0.20.

Now the caveats, and they matter. True widths are not known — every number here is a downhole length, so mineable widths may be narrower, and minimum mining width at Tuvatu is about 1.5 m. The flashiest grades (547, 502, 350, 302 g/t) come from samples just 0.3 to 0.4 m wide — real, but they pull the averages up. Two holes, TGC-0504 and TGC-0526, sit near the 1120 stope that has since been mined, so those intervals no longer represent rock in the ground. The Qualified Person, chief geologist Melvyn Levrel, is a company employee and not independent. Watch for those Zone 5 blocks to reach stoping within six months, the mill expansion from 300 to 400 tonnes per day, which the company targets for end of Q1 2027, and further results from ongoing Zone 2 and Zone 5 drilling.

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