From Will P. Stockwatch tonight Eric Friedland's Peregrine Diamonds Ltd. (PGD), down one-half cent to 22 cents on 124,000 shares, has wrapped up its drill program at Sikwane in Botswana. The company "successfully intersected the Sikwane kimberlites" -- failure would have been surprising since the company drilled three old discoveries -- allowing it to resolve their morphology, which is usually something geologists do when they are not expecting promotable diamond counts. Peregrine also drilled two new targets at Sikwane, but both were "explained by magnetic dolerite intrusions" -- a form of igneous rock that geologists often mention instead of saying, "we drilled a dud."
Peregrine drilled eight holes into the Sikwane-01 kimberlite, encountering an irregular sill or sheet of kimberlite that produced intervals from 0.20 metre to 8.77 metres thick. The company says the clay-altered kimberlite appears hypabyssal in texture -- often not the most desirable rock to find. Peregrine's two other kimberlite hits occurred at Sikwane-SE and Sikwane-3, where the company says "two narrow kimberlite stringers" were encountered in each body. Presumably the "narrow" and "stringer" suggest the thicknesses were tiny, a likelihood accentuated by the lack of a numeric measurement.
Nevertheless, Peregrine's geologists were happy with the work, which they say efficiently resolved the "irregular hypabyssal intrusive morphology" for the three kimberlites and "outlined substantive pinch-and-swell characteristics" for kimberlites in the Sikwane cluster as a whole. This, they say, will help Peregrine with its future targeting in the region. Investors will be happier if the targeting leads to drilling, and the drilling leads to long hits into diamondiferous pipes.