Voyager could have postponed its listing, however, the Australian Stock Exchange urged the budding petroleum company to proceed to show the market business would continue and management wanted to stand by its convictions that the company's story would weather the unfortunate timing.

The company's listing raised $4 million, including $500,000 in oversubscriptions, through an initial public offering. Not surprisingly there were virtually no trades on the first day of listing.

But in the months that have followed, Voyager has quietly accumulated an interesting portfolio of interests, including participation in the offshore Cliff Head project in the Perth Basin.

Attention was drawn to the company in late December/early January when the operator of permit WA286, Roc Oil, reported the Cliff Head-1 oil discovery. Cliff Head is predicted to contain between 80-100 million barrels of oil, and Voyager holds a 5% interest in the permit.

Subsequent remapping of the discovery uncovered another reservoir, with a possible 20-30 million barrels in place. This structure and others on trend will be tested during the Cliff Head appraisal program later this year.

Voyager's managing director, John Begg, could not be happier with the Cliff Head discovery, but he doesn't want it to overshadow the greater picture of the company's strategy and other projects.

Begg said Voyager has the elements needed to create a successful company and that management had the ability to identify opportunities that offered a short development lead-time and potential rapid escalation in value.

The junior's current focus is to boost cashflow to fund more exploration, and to move towards the day when the company is operator of producing fields and deciding on field developments. In addition, Voyager would like to expose shareholders to one or two high risk-high reward wells each year.

The two key figures in the company are Begg and exploration guru Ray Barnes. Both executives have more than 25 years experience apiece in the business and have managed successful projects both in Australia and internationally. Barnes has played a leading hand in over 25 oil and gas discoveries.

Furthermore, chief financial officer and company secretary Gillian Evans has served in similar roles for a number of listed Canadian oil and gas companies, and Begg was keen to point out her experience in other areas, such as Nasdaq listings and arranging financing for large international projects. It is clear management is already planning for the future.

Voyager has to learn to walk before it can run and management realises that for now the company will be restricted to junior holdings in promising assets. "Voyager was designed on listing to be a small but an attractive exploration and production company in its own right," Begg said.

Original seed investors in Voyager were up 130% on their investment at press time and shareholders who came on board via the initial public offering were up 30%, while turnover in the stock has been solid.

"We will not deviate from the plan - to build cashflow and offer investors exposure to good drilling opportunities," Begg said. "Initially they will be small interests in high reward wells but as our capabilities grow so will our exposure."

Other than its minor interest in Cliff Head, Voyager is a significant joint venture partner in a producing asset -- the Santos-operated Nockatunga oil project in south-west Queensland - in which it holds a 40.9% stake. Voyager's attributable production from Nockatunga is about 130 barrels of oil per day (bopd). It's small beer, but the area has upside potential.

Last November the joint venture announced an accelerated two-stage development program for the Thungo and Maxwell oilfields. The program includes fracture stimulation of up to four existing wells and two new production wells. A fracture stimulation of the Thungo-3 well is currently underway with the remainder of the program scheduled for April this year.

Voyager expects a 70% 250bopd incremental increase in production, and a 24% increase in developed oil reserves. Exploration of deeper oil plays in the Permian sands is also being examined.

Together with the field enhancements operator Santos is assessing whether to commence a coal methane test program on unusually thick and uniform coal seams lying beneath the oil reservoirs. The Epsilon coal seams range from 20-44m thick at depths between 1100-1400m. Typically such seams can hold many trillion cubic feet (tcf) of gas but development is contingent on flow rates that can be achieved by drilling a host of cheap wells to tap the gas. Voyager thinks a testing program (proposed but not confirmed to be carried out starting in April) would indicate a commercial gas resource of about 200 billion cubic feet (bcf) of gas, with scope for rapid development as a gas pipeline lies 10km to the west of the licence area.

The increased oil revenue from Nockatunga is anticipated to double Voyager's net operating revenue to about $1.5 million a year, well above prospectus forecasts.

Part 2 continued tomorrow