From Will P stockwatch Matt Manson's Stornoway Diamond Corp. (SWY) closed unchanged at $1.11 on 845,000 shares. The Ashton curse continues, as the company failed to recover any diamonds from its Adamantin property, 100 kilometres south of its new Renard mine. (The Renard project, discovered by Ashton Mining of Canada Inc. in 2001, hosts several pipes and dikes with economic quantities of diamonds -- enough to potentially support Stornoway's $800-million mine for decades. Nevertheless, few of the many targets drilled beyond Renard proved to be kimberlites and of those that did, none produced more than a smattering of microdiamonds.)
Stornoway, which drilled 11 distinct kimberlite bodies on Adamantin early this year, sent 300 kilograms of kimberlite for microdiamond recovery and another 2.5 tonnes for macrodiamond recovery, but without success. Mr. Manson, president and chief executive officer, says he and his crew were disappointed by "these early diamond results," but he expects additional kimberlites remain to be discovered, since the promising indicator mineral chemistry revealed in its till sampling has yet to be explained. (Stornoway does have one Adamantin diamond: it recovered the small gem from its till sampling last year.)
Stornoway has added more ground in the area and now holds just over 28,000 hectares at Adamantin. The company plans more till sampling and geophysics, presumably to get a better handle on where the diamond-bearing kimberlites might lie. Mr. Manson says that he has "a view to returning to drilling next year should results warrant." Results frequently warranted for previous explorers in the area surrounding Renard, a group that included De Beers Canada for a few years, but nothing came close to matching the success at Renard.