RE:RE:RE:Tidbits RJX The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score for Monday was a ho-hum 100-90-120 as the TSX Venture Exchange fell four points to 610. Robert Kasner's RJK Explorations Ltd. (RJX.A) rose one-half cent to six cents on 2,000 shares. The company is plodding along with its search for the source of the Nipissing diamond, a purported 800-carat gem discovered 115 years ago in a farmer's field just west of Lake Timiskaming in the Cobalt district of Northeastern Ontario.
The Nipissing find attracted attention from Tiffany & Co., which sent a crew to the area to find more big diamonds. Like that initial promotion, RJK's effort in the late 2010s attracted attention from far and wide -- from investors who sent the stock as high as 36 cents in 2020 to Hollywood producers looking to emulate the Curse of Oak Island television series.
So far, none of those who cocked an eyebrow at the story have met with success, as while RJK has been busy at times, results of its labour are difficult to divine. Indeed, while the company expounds at some length about its work, what it has accomplished is difficult to assess, given its shifting geological assessments -- a pattern that continued into this year.
The high point for the play came in 2020, when Mr. Kasner, president and chief executive officer, applauded not only the recovery of 63 minuscule diamonds from 22 kilograms of rock from Paradis Pond, rock initially described as "unique-looking core" deemed to be a granitoid breccia, but which the company's diamond guru, Peter Hubacheck, subsequently called "tuffisitic, sandy, kimberlite diatreme breccia" after comparing the material with kimberlite from the nearby Kon-1 discovery.
Flushed with that success, RJK subsequently drilled several flat-lying bodies that it applauded as kimberlites over the two years, only to subsequently reclassify the material as "glacial material containing kimberlite indicator minerals" -- a downgrading that explains the puny microdiamond counts from the essentially barren material and which readily explains RJK's southbound stock chart.
Despite the shifting assessments and a dearth of drilling, RJK did quietly mount a modest drill program late last year on some of its patented claims while it endured a lengthy wait for drill permits for its primary targets. The company completed three holes on the Kon property, but none of them encountered rock of interest -- unless one is interested in aphanitic matrix and globular clasts, or moderately siliceous and abundant calcite.
And so, Mr. Kasner and Mr. Hubacheck, RJK's project manager, decided to drop the earn-in option on the Kon property. After extensive drilling, they say "the results of this program did not meet RJK's project economic evaluation benchmarks at this time." That is a bit of an eyebrow raiser, as the property yielded one of the few discoveries still called kimberlite, and so the rationale for dropping Kon raises the question: What results from elsewhere do meet the company's benchmarks?
Perhaps the answer will come from the results of new drilling, now that permits are in hand, but drilling at the company's other targets over the past several months did not produce much encouragement. One feature of interest, a magnetic high near the 0.15-carat-per-tonne 95-2 kimberlite, was unsuccessfully drilled, as was a target drilled near Mozart Lake.
On the other hand, RJK did hit a 34.6-metre true-width interval of volcaniclastic kimberlite in another target but that was expected, as the target was the old Peddie kimberlite, discovered in the mid-1990s during the heyday of the Northeastern Ontario diamond rush. Peddie, a magnetic high anomaly spanning 1.8 hectares, received two holes at that time, but the rock was never tested for microdiamonds. In 2006, trenching at Peddie produced kimberlite indicators, but again, no effort was made to recover microdiamonds.
RJK is now testing a 100-kilogram batch of Peddie kimberlite for microdiamonds and Mr. Kasner and his crew say the results are "expected in the coming weeks." One should not have great expectations, however, as they also caution that the "diamond carrying capacity of the sample is medium -- often promoter-speak for abysmal -- based on the "low to moderate abundance of some indicator minerals but the absence of garnets. And so, stay tuned but don't hold your breath.