from stockwatch by Will Purcell
The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score on Tuesday was a mediocre 87-98-125 as the TSX Venture Exchange rose six points to 573. Grenville Thomas and Ken Armstrong's North Arrow Minerals Inc. (NAR) closed unchanged at four cents on 25,000 shares.
North Arrow remains focused at its Naujaat fancy diamond project in central Nunavut, but it is looking to revive a slumbering prospect in north-central Saskatchewan that was big news nearly a decade ago. Mr. Armstrong, president and chief executive officer, says that his company plans more till sampling and limited ground geophysics this fall at Pikoo, ahead of a drilling program next year.
That would be the first drilling at Pikoo in several years, but in 2013 North Arrow could not drill fast enough, after most of its targets proved to be kimberlites and most of those yielded at least modest quantities of microdiamonds. One, PK-150, captivated the market with its discovery hole, which yielded 210 kilograms of kimberlite, rock that contained 745 diamonds.
Most were tiny, but 23 were commercial-sized gems that weighed a total of 0.282 carat, which worked out to a diamond content of 133 carats per tonne. That result was an eyepopper -- the best grade ever from a prairie kimberlite -- and the news sent North Arrow's stock off to 75 cents, a quick double. It got even higher later that fall, even though subsequent diamonds counts cut the calculated grade.
More drilling followed, in 2015 and again the following year. In the end, North Arrow processed 582 kilograms of kimberlite from PK-150, recovering 1,308 diamonds, including 33 commercial gems that weighed a total of 0.488 carat. The resulting grade of 84 carats per hundred tonnes still ranks as the highest grade of any kimberlite found west of Quebec.
So, what was the problem? Veteran diamond investors have become insomniacs waiting for the other shoe to drop, and as usual when it dropped at Pikoo, it sounded the too-tiny-to-matter alarm. North Arrow's drilling roughly delineated a body about 150 metres along strike -- with signs it extends to 200 metres -- but its width was between 10 and 15 metres for the most part. In other words, unless there are hidden blows of bulges along its extent, PK-150 is unlikely to contain one million tonnes of kimberlite -- and hence significantly less than one million carats.
It will be six years between drill programs at Pikoo, assuming North Arrow does get a drill turning next year, but the company already has enough "unique and unsourced kimberlite indicator mineral trains" with geophysical targets convincing tucked away near their heads. Further, the company knows what to look for, as it has already found 10 kimberlites on the property using its same target definitions.
Investors point to the mammoth pipes a few hundred kilometres southward in the Fort a la Corne district, east of Prince Albert, as reason for encouragement, but the geological similarities are few at best. There are worries that the meat of the Pikoo pipes had been scoured away by glaciers aeons ago, while the Fort a la Corne bodies were protected by at least 100 metres of overburden. Still, one never knows what might be lurking within the next drill target -- and North Arrow says it is eager to find out next year.