from stockwatch 2023-01-04 16:49 ET - Market Summary
by Will Purcell
The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score for Wednesday was a positive 107-93-110 as the TSX Venture Exchange rose five points to 573. Grenville Thomas and Ken Armstrong's North Arrow Minerals Inc. (NAR) closed unchanged at 3.5 cents on 171,000 shares Tuesday. The company has sold 16.7 million shares at five cents, raising $835,000 of the $1-million it was seeking. While it is encouraging that the company came close to its target, it did so only because insiders bought 12 million of the shares.
Worse, North Arrow has cancelled a concurrent placement of flow-through shares in which it looked to sell 8.33 million shares at six cents, seeking another $500,000. And so, with just $835,000 of the $1.5-million that the company had been seeking, Mr. Armstrong, president and chief executive officer, will have to further prioritize his priorities. For now, North Arrow says that the cash will be used to advance its Canadian diamond projects, "including the Pikoo project," and for general corporate purposes.
That mention of Pikoo, its slumbering diamond project east of La Ronge in Saskatchewan, appears to telegraph it as the 2023 priority. While there is little doubt, yet at least, that Naujaat in central Nunavut is the company's most advanced and best prospect, the next big push there is not expected until 2024 -- and then only if the company can find the gobs of cash needed to complete a 10,000-tonne bulk sample. There are early-stage prospects on the company's books -- Mel, northeast of Naujaat on Melville peninsula and Loki, south of Lac de Gras in the Northwest Territories -- but both present logistical challenges for required drilling.
And so, off to Pikoo it will be. Pikoo was big news in 2013 and the following year, after North Arrow hit kimberlites in its first drill program on the project, and then produced plenty of macrodiamonds in one of the discoveries. That find, PK-150, showed a diamond content of 133 carats per hundred tonnes, and while that gaudy value dropped in subsequent tests, the latest data show a content of 87 carats per hundred tonnes over a cumulative sample topping 500 kilograms of kimberlite.
Unfortunately, while PK-150 might be a rich source of diamonds, it has been proven to be tiny, with a likely length of 200 metres and a width of no more than 10 to 15 metes. Those dimensions suggest the body might be home to one million tonnes of kimberlite at best, leaving it no more than a geological oddity without there being far larger pipes nearby to support a mine.
And so, the hunt for those larger bodies resumes after several years of comparative silence at Pikoo. North Arrow collected 110 new till samples from 10 areas on the property last year and completed two ground geophysical surveys and line cutting -- work in preparation for drilling this year. Mr. Armstrong says that he and his crew were looking to better define several unsourced kimberlite indicator mineral trains on the property, and to test some unsampled areas immediately down-ice of geophysical targets identified earlier.
In other words, North Arrow is picking up where it left off in the mid-2010s once the Pikoo enthusiasm had waned. While the market's lack of interest was no surprise -- shrinking diamond counts and tiny kimberlites do have a dampening effect on any promotion after all -- North Arrow did leave plenty of stones unturned on the property when it shifted its gaze northward in 2016.
Indeed, Pikoo has been locked away in a promotional time capsule since North Arrow's last effort nearly seven years ago. At that time, the company cheered the collection of 101 till samples from several areas -- North Pikoo, South Pikoo, East Pikoo and Bear Lake -- areas where Mr. Armstrong and his crew believed undiscovered kimberlites might be present. These samples were to have driven a 2017 drill program. Now, if North Arrow can stretch its meagre supply of cash, that drilling will finally take place this year.