Chuck Fipke’s 1991 diamond find in the barrens may be, as he says, “a past world,” but it still flavours everything he does, from advancing the science of kimberlite-hunting to the naming of his most promising thoroughbred.

Dr. Charles Fipke is, more than any other person, responsible for the existence of the diamond industry in Canada. Canadian Diamonds caught up with Fipke just before he boarded a flight to Frankfurt to make a presentation on the current projects of his primary exploration company, Metalex Ventures. His wealth has not caused him to slow down, it seems. Fipke is involved in projects around the world and can talk about each of them with passion and precision. He can also wax eloquent about one of his lifelong loves, horses.

Canadian Diamonds: When you were 18 you bought a retired thoroughbred for $300, the most expensive purchase of your life to that time. Now you get to take horses to the Kentucky Derby. Did you have any racing at the Derby this year?

Chuck Fipke: Yes, but just in training. I have a really good two-year-old that I hope will go to the Derby next year. He’s really exceptional. His father is Tale of the Cat so he’s called Tale of Ekati. He’s in training in New York this year with a guy that’s won the Kentucky Derby and had one horse in this year’s Derby. I have a dozen or so in training in Canada with Roger Attfield, who’s won the Queen’s Plate a record seven times.

CD: Do you have horses at home in Kelowna with you?

CF: I only have my riding horse this year. My riding horse was the champion juvenile in Western Canada – he won the most stakes as a two-year-old – and he really goes.

CD: It’s an expensive hobby.

CF: Yes, but I’ve had some success. I had a mare by Secretariat in about 1990 that I sent to Ireland. She was covered by Northern Dancer’s best son, Sadler’s Wells, who sired 62 Group 1 winners (the next closest in history is Sir Tristram who only sired 45). So Sadler’s Wells is the best sire ever, even better than his father, and I was quite lucky.

The offspring, Perfect Soul, was a champion in Canada and went down to a Group 1 race in Kentucky and set the track record for a mile at Keeneland. The horse is now a stallion and you have to invest quite a bit in stallions. I’ll give you an example: Six or eight years ago Unbridled’s Song stood for $10,000, and in his first two crops to race, he got four Group 1 winners. Now his stud fee is $200,000, and if he keeps on being a good producer he may go right up to Storm Cat, which is $500,000 per cover. Stallions cover up to 280 mares per year now, so if Storm Cat covers 200, that’s $100-million per year. It’s big money, a lot more than you’d make if you had 10 per cent of a diamond mine.

I’ve invested in getting some good mares to Perfect Soul. His first crop are yearlings now so they’ll be broken in the fall and then raced in 2008.

CD: Moving on to your other great passion: Your primary exploration vehicle, Metalex Ventures, recently announced some impressive results from the T1 project in Ontario.

CF: There have been a lot of diamonds found at T1, a pipe 80 kilometres west of Victor. We’ve processed about 4.3 tonnes and we’ve recovered 1,768 diamonds from two-and-a-quarter-inch core. In a thousand kilos we’re getting 356 diamonds greater than 0.106 mm, which turns out to be around 3.5 times as many diamonds as De Beers gets out of Victor from the same type of core. And the thing is we’re getting a little over 59 per cent white stones. Ekati is 25, sometimes 30 per cent white stones of gem quality.

De Beers publicly stated to an analyst that they were getting $486 per carat about eight months ago. That will be more than twice the average price we would get at Ekati, so Victor will be the best quality kimberlite diamond mine in the world.

CD: Is T1 Metalex’s primary project?

CF: No, it’s just one of them. The pipe’s about the same size as Panda, around three hectares, and we’ve recently found a couple of more pipes. The T1 pipe is a little different from Victor in that it’s older than the limestone in the area. The Victor pipe actually penetrates the limestone. Also, Victor is predominantly a pipe of eclogitic and iherzolitic diamonds whereas T1 is hartzburgitic. We’re getting really great G10-10s; they’re the best G10s, low calcium, high chrome. I haven’t really seen any better quality of G10s than the T1.

Around 20 kilometres away we found another pipe, U2, and it’s about seven hectares in size and we’re drilling it right now. It penetrates the limestone, like Victor, and we have quite similar chemistry to Victor, eclogitic and iherzolitic. We just recovered 17 diamonds from 142 kilos. For Ekati it’s not all that great, but its similar to what you’d get at Victor in terms of quantity of diamonds per hundred kilos and in terms of large-sized diamond distribution. About 83 per cent of the diamonds were gem quality, so the quality is similar to Victor, but it’s only a 142-kilo sample. We’ve drilled the first two-and-a-quarter-inch core hole and we have another 650-kilo sample that’s just arrived and we’ve begun processing. We’ve made two more intersections of new discovery kimberlite there too, but we haven’t got a big enough sample to report diamond quantities yet.

CD: What else is Metalex up to?

CF: We’re exploring in southern Morocco on a more than 2.6-billion-year-old Archean craton. It’s in an area that was never explored before because it’s southwest Sahara, a formerly disputed territory that has now been taken over by Morocco with UN approval. We’re in the project 60 per cent, with the other 40 per cent going to the Moroccan government. We were granted licences in part because we explored using the same samples for base metals, gold, uranium. We have several gold anomalies, several nickel/copper/cobalt anomalies and several uranium anomalies.

We have about 25,000 square kilometres and what we’ve found is several areas with diamond inclusion indicator minerals, and these old Archean cratons are of course very favourable for diamonds. We have quite a number of areas with really good diamond-inclusion geochemistry, like G10-9s, so we expect to find a new pipe field and the G10-9s mean that some of the pipes will be high-grade.

CD: Could you explain that subcategorization within the G10 garnets?

CF: It’s more or less our own system, but it’s related to the grade. We grade them from 1 to 10 with 10 being the best and so we expect high grades of diamonds but we’re still at early stages. We’re also exploring in Angola.

We have about 12,000 square kilometres in the headwaters of the Cuango River, the most diamondiferous river in the world. This river flows northward into the Congo and along the river there are all kinds of alluvial diamond operators. A year or two back SDM recovered about $106-million worth of diamonds at one site.

The thing is it’s been flown with airborne magnetics and we have about 127 magnetic anomalies, and four of them model at 20 to 39 hectares. We were able during the wet season to test four of the anomalies and all of them were kimberlites and two of them in little 10-kilogram samples had microdiamonds. We still have 120 or so more targets to test. Some of these are in the flood plain, covered in alluviums, adjacent to the Cuango River, and our indicator minerals indicate that they are pipes. Upstream from our concession, we don’t get indicator minerals in the Cuango River, so we think the source area of the diamonds being mined downstream is in our concession.

CD: Are you searching for stuff other than diamonds?

CF: Cantex has been exploring since 1996 in Yemen. We started off with a concession of 54,000 square kilometres looking for gold and base metals. We’ve found three really large massive sulphide deposits – nickel/copper/cobalt. The most advanced one we’ve had about 15 intersections and they have averaged about 14.6 metres in thickness of massive sulphides. Not counting any platinum or gold or silver, it goes for about $608 per tonne for the 15 holes. They’re major, major deposits. There’s been reluctance by some companies to go into Yemen, but we do have some majors that are now interested in maybe making a deal.

Cantex also has 13 new gold discoveries in Nevada. There’s been geology, geophysics, soil sampling and they’re all permitted and ready to drill.

Metalex also has projects in Brazil, Mali, Greenland, Quebec and Ontario, and we’re in joint venture with Dianor in Wawa.

CD: Your lab in Kelowna, CF Minerals, has helped keep you at the forefront of research for thirty years. What is the current frontier in the search for kimberlites? Is there a question you’d like to have answered?

CF: When I can, I do research. Occasionally you get situations where you get good indicators and no diamonds, and we want to be able to predict that.

What can happen is your kimberlite magmas – there are different kinds – can penetrate your diamond horizons a couple of hundred kilometres down, and if there’s chemical disequilibrium between the magma and the diamonds, the diamonds can be reabsorbed. I’m currently using a database from all over the world using the compositions of titanium chromites and picroilmenites, which actually grow from the kimberlite and take the chemistry of the magma. I’m analyzing those compositions and based on the average analysis we’d determine the per cent preservation or conversely the per cent reabsorption of diamonds. So if we get a situation where we get very positive indicator minerals and if, after analyzing the picroilmenites and titanium chromites, we get 100 per cent reabsorption, we won’t find diamonds. So that’s what I’ve been working on.

CD: What other interests have you pursued now that you can?

CF: I try and take some time off around Christmas – when it’s cloudy – and I usually go scuba diving. I do downhill and x-country skiing and of course I horseback ride.

CD: How old are you? You’re in your early-60s now?

CF: One thing I never do is lie about my age. I’m 27.

CD: I read a passage from Vernon Frolick’s biography of you, Fire Into Ice, to my kids. It was set in Papua New Guinea in 1971, when you and three local guides were hiking up a stream bed. One guide found and ate a frog “the size of a small pie”. My kids loved it and talked for days about the guy eating the frog.

CF: Well the first time it happened I’d just been in the bush a few days and we were going up this stream and this guy spotted this frog and went after it. He caught it and he just ate it. He was at the time just in native outfit. A year or two later he was guiding again, this time wearing a dirty old t-shirt, wearing a watch he couldn’t read and he was used to a different diet. They caught this frog and he didn’t want to eat it. I had to bribe him to get a photo: How quickly things change.