Potash One dealmaker Matysek turns his hand to B.C. gold

Fresh from the $434-million sale of his Saskatchewan potash explorer Potash One to German fertilizer giant K+S Aktiengesellschaft, Vancouver’s Paul Matysek is now turning his attention to a small gold explorer named Ocean Park Ventures (OCP-V), focusing on the Americas.

If the saying ‘a promoter is only as good as his last two deals’ holds true, Matysek should have much to offer investors. Potash One sold for $4.50 a share in early 2011, leaving K+S to fork over the US$2.5 billion needed to put the company’s Legacy potash project in Saskatchewan into production. He joined the company as president and CEO in late 2007, making the most out of the massive surge in demand for potash over the past five years.

Before that, the geologist and geochemist served as president and CEO of uranium explorer Energy Metals from 2004 to 2007 while advancing its valuable in-situ recovery uranium development projects in the United States. Matysek helped bring the stock up from around $1.70 in 2004 to $19.12 a share in 2007, when the company was gobbled up by Uranium One (uuu-t) for $1.8 billion.

While Matysek has held various positions with a number of other companies since then, including Lithium One (li-v), Dundarave Resources (ddx-v) and Harvest One Capital (won-v), Ocean Park Ventures appears to be his main focus at the moment.

The company raised $9.5 million a few months ago in private placements at 55¢ and 65¢ a unit and currently has around $12.5 million in the bank. It plans to spend over $9 million of that this year exploring three properties in the Americas that Matysek says all have “bulk-tonnage potential.”

Most of the expenditures will be on the company’s new Trapper gold project, a previously undrilled hydrothermal gold-in-breccia system near Atlin, B.C., that was last sampled by Chevron Minerals in the 1980s. Ocean Park is earning up to a 70% interest in the project from Constantine Metal Resources (cem-v), having agreed to spend nearly $10 million on exploration.

The company is now about halfway through a first-pass 5,000-metre drill program at Trapper, comprising about 25 holes. As Ocean Park’s chief geologist, Chris Taylor, explained to The Northern Miner in a recent telephone interview, “When we started doing the work there this year, the focus was to see the true size of the system. Is it really this 2-km-by-500-metre system [defined by Chevron]? The answer to that is no – I spent a couple weeks there at the start of July and in fact we’ve identified that the hydrothermal alteration is several kilometres long on the Trapper project and certainly much wider than 500 metres.”

As reported in an Aug. 23 news release, the company has sent core from 13 drill holes recently completed at Trapper to the lab. Though no assays were included in the release, Ocean Park said 12 of the holes intersected one to three zones of sulphide mineralization associated with intense carbonate and/or silica alteration over widths of between 5 and 96.8 metres. It further noted 17 intercepts had greater than 1% sulphide mineralization with an average drill-indicated width of 28.1 metres. Visible gold was also identified in one hole.

As there is only one or two months left before winter sets in up north, Ocean Park is now mobilizing a second drill rig to the site. So far, drilling has tested the multikilometre surface anomaly approximately 200 metres along strike and across 300 to 400 metres of width.

Meanwhile, Ocean Park has exploration programs ongoing at its two other properties: Chisna, a greenfield gold-copper project in south-east Alaska; and Adelita, a largely undrilled copper-gold project in Sinora, Mexico.

Chisna is the more advanced of the two, having been drilled last year by joint venture partner Corvus Gold (kor-t). Ocean Park can earn up to a 70% interest by completing a positive feasibility study on the project within 10 years.  

The company is planning on spending about $3 million there on exploration this year, including 17 diamond drill holes totalling roughly 3,000 metres. The main target is the Golden Range, a gold-in-soil-and-rock anomaly spanning over 9 kms by 2 kms. Gold values from roughly 300 samples taken at the site average 0.6 gram gold per tonne, with the highest value returning 50.4 grams gold. Four other drill targets besides Golden Range will be tested.

A few thousand metres of drilling on various targets compiled by Corvus in 2010 failed to find economic mineralization, however, with the best result returning 2.1 metres grading 4.4% copper, 1.66 grams gold and 21.8 grams silver. Nevertheless, chief geologist Taylor said Corvus was mainly looking for porphyry copper mineralization and did not properly test the Golden Range along strike. As he reported in an Aug. 18 press release, gold mineralization at Chisna “is associated with a major structural system trending along a northwest to southeast axis, with numerous mineralized splays, secondary structures and fault-associated hydrothermal breccias.”

Lastly, Ocean Park is completing geophysical surveys at Adelita in preparation for a 2,000-metre phase-one drill program later this year. The copper-gold-molybdenum-silver porphyry project is 6 km away from Pan American Silver‘s (paa-t) open-pit Alamo Dorado silver mine and has only seen limited skarn drilling, the results of which include 16.5 metres of 1.97% copper, 0.84 gram gold and 73 grams silver. Ocean Park is earning up to a 65% interest in the project from Minaurum Gold (mgg-v).

Shares of Ocean Park jumped 14¢ following the company’s assay-less Aug. 23 drilling update, closing at 84¢ on 748,000 shares traded. The company has 78.5 million shares outstanding and a 52-week share price range of 23¢-90¢.