Tapestry drills hit nickel in the Florence Lake area of Labrador

The best nickel grade from all the drilling that has taken place in Labrador over the past few years was released this month — yet they are not from Voisey’s Bay.

Tapestry Ventures (TPV-V), one of the Prime Group of companies, hit 1.25 metres of 6.6% nickel in Hole TFL96-1 at the Baikie showing in the Florence Lake area.

An additional 1,000 metres of drilling will be drilled in order to test the depth extension of Baikie’s mineralization.

Tapestry is earning a 50% interest in the property from Falconbridge (FL-T).

Other intersections from TFL96-1, and from hole TFL96-2, include 5.15 metres of 2.35% nickel, 1.7 metres of 2.42% nickel, and 7.9 metres of 2.02% nickel.

Copper and cobalt assay results were negligible.

The project lies 70 km southwest of the coastal village of Hopedale and 180 km southeast of the Voisey’s Bay project, now in the hands of Inco (N-T). The claims cover an Archean age greenstone terrain, which straddles the crustal boundary between the Makkovik and Nain geological provinces.

Tapestry considers the mineralized zones that were intersected in holes TFL96-1 and TFL96-2 to be the downdip continuation of mineralization identified from surface sampling at the Baikie showing. Grab samples collected earlier this year assayed between 8.1% and 9.76% nickel, along with significant values of platinum and palladium.

Tapestry President Peter Tallman says the massive and disseminated mineralization found in the core is hosted by ultramafic lava flows similar to those in Western Australia, which produced a cluster of nickel deposits in the Kambalda region.

Tallman explained that the showing was first drilled by Brinex in 1962 using a small drill. Nickel was intersected, but the showing was essentially ignored. A graduate thesis completed in the mid-1980s pegged the showing as a xenolith of mineralization, and no further exploration was carried out.

Falconbridge later acquired the property, and its 1989 drill program determined that the Baikie showing was, in fact, not a xenolith. But when it became clear that the showing was inferior to the Raglan property in northern Quebec, Falconbridge focused its attention on that prospect.