from stockwatch 2022-10-18 17:44 ET - Market Summary
by Will Purcell
Grenville Thomas and Ken Armstrong's North Arrow Minerals Ltd. (NAR) closed unchanged at five cents on 68,000 shares. The company is sending exploration crews to its Pikoo diamond project, east of La Ronge in Northern Saskatchewan. North Arrow is looking to identify new drill targets for a 2023 drill program on Pikoo, a property that was big news a decade ago, but which faded from view a few years later after the company failed to find more than a single discovery of interest.
The fall program calls for till sampling and geophysics. Mr. Armstrong, president and chief executive officer, says that the till sampling is intended to better define several unsourced kimberlite indicator mineral trains, and to test previously unsampled areas down-ice of priority targets that the company has just identified from a new look at old data.
Mr. Armstrong points out North Arrow's previous successes at Pikoo -- most of the earlier targets proved to be kimberlites -- and so he concludes that positive indicator mineral results from the fall program will immediately position any new targets as priorities for drilling next year. As well, the coming geophysical work will cover land-based targets, features that will also see line cutting in advance of drilling next year.
The PK-150 kimberlite, which led off North Arrow's kimberlite discoveries in 2013, proved to be the best of the lot. An initial 210-kilogram batch of rock yielded 745 diamonds and of those, 23 were large enough to remain on a 0.85-millimetre sieve. Those largest gems weighed 0.282 carat, which implied a 133-carat-per-tonne grade. With that eyepopper in tow, Mr. Armstrong and crew promoted North Arrow's stock to a 75-cent high as he sent his crews back for more rock.
Subsequent diamond recoveries fell short of the initial result, but they were sufficiently encouraging that North Arrow's stock topped 80 cents late in 2013 and held its gains through the following year. In the end, the company tested 582 kilograms of kimberlite from PK-150 and recovered 1,308 microdiamonds. Of those, 33 sat on a 0.85-millimetre sieve and the 0.488-carat haul implied a diamond content of 84 carats per hundred tonnes, which ranks tops among any kimberlite discovery in all provinces west of Quebec.
Unfortunately, size matters as much as grade, and the tiny size of PK-150 snuffed out the Pikoo promotion. While North Arrow's drilling showed the kimberlite was 150 metres long and its geophysics suggested it was at least 50 metres longer, none of its work suggested that the width of PK-150 would be more than the indicated 10 to 15 metres. Therefore, without any unknown bulges or blows along its length, the deposit would likely fall short of one million tonnes, making it just a geological oddity.
Unless, that is, North Arrow were to score more rich discoveries that could add carats to the project. The discoveries came quickly over a two-year stretch, but while several of the finds revealed microdiamonds, none of them came close to the counts or sizes that PK-150 managed. Accordingly, with investors choosing to dodge diamond projects as they would an outbreak of Ebola, Pikoo fell silent after the mid-2010s.
And so, while Pikoo remains a tough sell with investors, North Arrow's kimberlite success rate and the proven presence of high grades at the project make further drilling an enticing prospect -- especially for a company not expecting a major work program at Naujaat, its flagship diamond project, until 2024. The good news, of course, is that working Pikoo carries just a fraction of the cost for what is needed at Naujaat and so, a 2023 drill program on new targets appears likely.