Contango Silver & Gold Inc.

All right, everyone. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, depending on where in the world you're signing in from today. Great to see a packed house for today's event. I've got with me today Rick Van Nieuwenhuizen, CEO of Contango Silver and Gold, and Mike Clark, the company's CFO. Here's how today's going to work with the folks in the room. I've got some questions based on this morning's press release, but this is also an interactive event, so please do enter your questions in the chat section on the bottom of the screen. We're going to try to stick to half an hour today, so if we can't get to your questions, I'll make sure the Contango team receives all the content as soon as the event is over, but we will try to get to as many as we can today. The event is also being recorded and will be available for replay this afternoon, Eastern Time. So, let's get into the meat and potatoes here. Rick, before we get into the Q1 numbers, you've been telegraphing forever that this quarter was going to likely be the lightest production quarter of what is presumably the lightest production year for Manchot under the current mine plan. Can you remind investors how the 2026 mine sequencing was designed and why QAnon was always going to look the way it was relative to what's coming in the back half of the year?

Sure, Bianca. Good to see you again. And I think we're together here in Frankfurt for the Goldman Conference, so looking forward to that. But, yeah, 2026 was always going to be the low production year and the higher cost year in general. And it really did sequence for the beginning. The first half was worse than the second half. So in terms of gold production ounces and in terms of costs, lower ounces, higher costs. We'll make up for that as the year progresses. And this was basically the transition year from mining the north pit, finishing up mining the north pit, and transitioning to stripping and mining on the main pit or south pit. Um, and, and so it's just this, this, the mine plan playing out as it was originally described in the feasibility study, nothing, nothing really has changed. Um, uh, except the gold price is a hell of a lot higher than it was when we did the feasibility study at $1,400 gold. So, uh, we are, we are mining to the mine plan. Um, we continue to recognize that we've got a large pile of low grade mineralized waste is how it's categorized technically. That is going on a separate stockpile. We've found a few more benches of ore in the north pit. So we've continued to mine that, which is that takes equipment away from pre-stripping on the south pit. And so all this is kind of just playing out according to the mine plan with a few slight modifications that are actually positives in the sense of finding more ore at the bottom of the north pit. It's not a bad thing. It's a good thing. It does delay the production on the south pit. But, yeah, bottom line, I know you've got another question coming at me, so I won't – I'll let you ask it, and then I'll continue those details.

Perfect. Well, I was going to say that a share of Q1 production came in at just over 8,000 ounces, and you're already guiding to 10,000 ounces from the second campaign alone, which kicked off yesterday. Walk us through what changes as you move into the South Pits both on the grade and on tonnage, and how confident you are in landing inside that 40,000 to 45,000-ounce annual range.