Mac Balkam's Eskay Mining Corp. (ESK) slid eight cents to 35.5 cents on 1.36 million shares on word it has "very encouraging results" from this year's drilling at the Consolidated Eskay gold project in the Golden Triangle district of northwestern British Columbia. The headline hit, in the Cumberland volcanogenic massive sulphide discovery zone, was a 15-metre near-surface intersection that graded 3.02 grams of gold and 68.7 grams of silver per tonne plus 0.24 per cent copper, 4.86 per cent zinc and 0.73 per cent lead -- an equivalent of 6.28 grams of gold per tonne.
Three of the eight other holes drilled at Cumberland missed the mark, but three others yielded noteworthy results -- at least worthy of helpfully being bolded in the company's news release. These were also near-surface encounters, but the grades were notably lower, with the also-ran hit grading 3.91 grams of gold equivalent per tonne across 20.1 metres. The company also applauded assays from one of four holes drilled into the Tarn Lake area. It delivered 7.83 grams of gold and 6.96 grams of silver per tonne across 2.45 metres.
Mr. Balkam, president and chief executive officer, left the promotion to his vice-president of exploration, John DeDecker -- perhaps because for 13 years Mr. Balkam was a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer with much of his time spent investigating stock market fraud. (He left the force 42 years ago -- yes, he is getting long in the tooth -- to become a retail stockbroker. For the past 13 years -- that is a total of 55 years of employment for those keeping score -- he has been running Eskay.)
Mr. DeDecker had plenty to say about the results, unfortunately tinged with a "just the geological facts, ma'am" approach. He lauded the rock encountered as "intense polymetallic sulphide mineralization" that "ranges from stockwork-style to massive sea-floor-hosted mineralization." He went on of course, as geologists are wont to do, but he managed to zero in on three areas that he and his crew plan to test next year -- the new Scarlet Knob sea floor horizon, a pronounced magnetic anomaly 300 metres south of Cumberland and the Tarn Lake mineralization.