Drilling extends to 250 m Novamin’s Tonawanda zone

The Tonawanda property, 3.5 miles east of Cadillac, Que., is shaping up into an interesting gold play for joint venture partners Novamin and St. Joe Canada.

A gold-bearing zone discovered by two earlier holes (N.M., Dec 8/86) has been extended over 820 ft by Novamin, the operator and 51% joint venture partner. The zone lies directly under Highway 117, one of the main thoroughfares in northwestern Quebec.

Not all assays hvae been received from the pre-Christmas drilling of 11 holes, but results of significance net yet reported include:

From Length Grade Hole # (ft) (ft) (oz gold/ton) 27-5 246.3 8.0 0.225 27-6 281.7 13.6 0.094 27-7 236.0 6.8 0.222 27-8 195.2 14.8 0.090 27-9 55.8 19.5 0.135 27-10 129.1 20.0 0.334 including 142.4 6.7 0.900

The company plans to drill two more holes under each of these holes to verify the downward continuity of the zone. Novamin President Robert Ginn says he believes the zone to be a tabular, vertical body and will try to confirm that with subsequent drilling.

In fact Hole 4, which was drilled beneath Hole 3, returned a wider intersection with better grade. Hole 3 gave 0.235 oz over 16.2 ft while Hole 4 gave 0.513 over 23 ft.

Dr Ginn says he hopes that trend continues.

Novamin and St. Joe have been working in the area since 1982. The Tonawanda property is one of several properties the two companies have combined under what they call the Darius joint venture.

While much of the work done since 1982 was necessary preliminary studies and research, both companies have become more aggressive and independent in the past year. The encouraging results of late on this and other properties can be at least partially attributed to that new entrepreneurial profile.

Novamin, although just over a year old, is essentially a former subsidiary of Sulpetro Ltd., an oil and gas producer. St. Joe Canada is a wholly-owned subsidiary of St. Joe Gold, 10% of which was sold to the public in 1985 by St. Joe Minerals, a U.S. company that is in turn 100% owned by Fluor Corp.