from will purcell by Will Purcell
The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score for Friday was a mediocre 47-52-148. The TSX Venture Exchange fell one point to 697 while polished diamond prices reclaimed 1 per cent. Robert Gannicott's Dominion Diamond Corp. (DDC) continued its rally, gaining 37 cents to $23.54 on 215,000 shares. (The stock cost less than $13 last summer.) Dominion, which has boosted profits and extended the lives of its Ekati and Diavik mines over the past two years, will resume paying a "sustainable" annual dividend of 40 U.S. cents in May. Alexander Stewart's Xmet Inc. (XME) traded actively again today, dropping one-half cent to four cents on 3.92 million shares. Xmet is touting sulphides at its Blackflake West graphite play near Albany in Northern Ontario and is drilling for gold in Quebec.
Patrick Evans's Kennady Diamonds Inc. (KDI) up eight cents to $4.81 on 41,000 shares after it revealed promotable diamond counts from its Kelvin kimberlite complex, 10 kilometres northeast of Gahcho Kue in the Northwest Territories. A 1.83-tonne batch of rock from Kelvin South produced 128 diamonds larger than a 0.85-millimetre sieve through caustic fusion. Those gems weighed 6.68 carats, an average of 3.64 carats per tonne. That is significantly higher than the 2.6 carats per tonne that Kennady Diamonds averaged in mini-bulk tests elsewhere at Kelvin, although the company did produce comparable caustic fusion grades across Kelvin and the nearby Faraday kimberlite. The Kennady South diamonds also had a promotable size distribution pattern: the largest stone weighed 1.36 carats and three others clustered near the one-half-carat mark. All four stones were classified as off-white gems. Kennady got an even better result from its Kelvin sheet, a Snap Lake-like kimberlite associated with the Kelvin pipe. A 47.6-kilogram sample produced six gems larger than a 0.85-millimetre sieve, supporting a grade of 5.95 carats per tonne. The largest gem, a 0.12-carat octahedron, was classified as white.
Mr. Evans, CEO, says he is "very pleased with these excellent diamond recovery results," but his ultimate satisfaction may be contingent on the mini-bulk test that Kennady Diamonds extracted along the oblong Kelvin kimberlite this spring. The company had wanted 500 tonnes, but had to be content with just 436 tonnes as the drill rigs had to be shipped south before the winter road melted away. Mr. Evans, often Howe Street's master of understatement, expects the estimated 10 million to 13 million tonnes of Kelvin and Faraday kimberlite will average between two and 2.5 carats per tonne. Kennady's Kelvin mini-bulk test has a good shot at topping that grade, and with a bit of luck its diamond valuation could top the $118 (U.S.) per tonne achieved at Gahcho Kue. Further, Kennady's delineation drilling is producing significant kimberlite intersections at Faraday-2 as the company moves its drill rig northwestward, and its tonnage is growing with each turn of the drill.