Canadian mining company PMI Ventures has announced results of the first of eight to ten diamond drill holes (1 050 m in total), that comprise the first phase of the 2003 drill programme. The package of exploration concessions and applications covered an area of about 400 sq km along a length of 50 km of the axis of the Asankrangwa Gold Belt in south western Ghana. The current drill programme has been designed to follow up on targets defined in earlier shallow RC drilling.

One of the holes drilled in the Fromenda Grid area, at a length of 86 m at 45? using HQ drill string, intersected a mineralised section of 30 m. This mineralised intercept was located at a depth of about 20 m below surface. Follow-up drilling to test both strike and down-dip extensions of the mineralised zone is currently in progress. Bottle-roll testing of representative samples of the mineralised zone will be completed to test the leachability of the mineralised material for a possible heap-leach operation.

The company says results of this first drill intersection of the Fromenda Grid mineralised zone are considered to be very satisfactory since the grade and thickness of the zone, as defined by the current diamond-drill programme are both better by about 40%. These results are comparable to those obtained in earlier rotary percussion drilling undertaken in 1999 by TriStar Gold, in the same area, in an extensive programme of shallow RC drilling. Results of the ongoing drill programme will be released over the next two to three weeks. The vice president of exploration for the company, Douglas MacQuarrie, and Goknet Mining supervised and directed all work associated with the drilling programme. All sample analyses were conducted at SGS Laboratory Services in Tarkwa, Ghana.