Potash One dealmaker Matysek turns to BC gold

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

If the adage “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 with the task of spending US$2.5 billion to put the company’s Legacy potash project in Saskatchewan into production. Matysek 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 in-situ recovery uranium development projects in the U.S. 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.

Matysek has held various positions with other companies since then, including Lithium One (LI-V), Dundarave Resources (DDX-V) and Harvest One Capital (WON-V), but Ocean Park appears to be his main focus at the moment. Matysek is currently the company’s chairman and acting president, after Donald Gee resigned as president for health reasons in 2010.

The company raised $9.5 million a few months ago in private placements at 55¢ and 65¢ a unit, and now has around $12.5 million in the bank. It plans to spend over $9 million this year exploring three properties in the Americas that Matysek reckons 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 halfway through a first-pass, 5,000-metre drill program at Trapper, comprising about 25 holes.

“When we started doing the work there this year, the focus was to see the true size of the system. Is it really this two-kilometre-by-five-hundred-metre system [defined by Chevron]?” Ocean Park’s chief geologist, Chris Taylor, explains. “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 five hundred metres.”

As reported in an Aug. 23 news release, the company has sent core from 13 new drill holes 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 silica alteration over widths between 5 and 97 metres. It noted 17 intercepts had greater than 1% sulphide mineralization with a 28-metre average width. Visible gold was also identified in one hole.

As there is only a month or two left before winter sets in at Trapper, Ocean Park is now mobilizing a second drill rig to the site. So far, drilling has tested the multi-kilometre surface anomaly that is  300 to 400 metres wide. 

Meanwhile, Ocean Park is actively exploring its two other properties: Chisna, a greenfield gold-copper project in Alaska; and Adelita, a largely undrilled copper-gold project in Sonora, Mexico. 

Chisna is the more advanced of the two, as it was 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 plans to spend $3 million exploring there this year, including 17 diamond drill holes totalling 3,000 metres. The main target is Golden Range, a 9-by-2-km gold-in-soil-and-rock anomaly. Gold values from 300 samples taken at the site average 0.6 gram gold per tonne, with the highest value returning 50.4 grams gold. Four 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.

Taylor says Corvus was mainly looking for porphyry-copper mineralization and did not properly test Golden Range along strike. In contrast, Ocean Park is finding that 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.

Ocean Park is completing geophysical surveys at Adelita in preparation for a 2,000-metre initial drill program later this year. The copper-gold-molybdenum-silver porphyry project is 6 km from Pan American Silver‘s (PAA-T, PAAS-Q) open-pit Alamo Dorado silver mine and has only seen limited skarn drilling, the results of which include 17 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¢.