The majority of steam assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) development to date has been concentrated in the McMurray formation in the Eastern Athabasca fairway. More recently operators have identified projects with considerable resources located in shoreface sands of the Grand Rapids formation in the Wabasca area. Laricina Energy's Germain thermal project in Grand Rapids has associated basal water underlying much of the reservoir. In this paper the authors show that SAGD can be configured to maximize bitumen recovery for such reservoirs, based on laboratory and new simulation studies. The result is a SAGD configuration where the producers are placed at the base of porosity, within the basal water zone.