Driller knows his stuff

Cyr Drilling Ltd. of Winnipeg is a relative newcomer to the mineral exploration industry, but the man behind the firm has a track record as solid as Canadian bedrock. Sixty-five-year-old founder and president Gordon Cyr grew up in the northern Manitoba mining community of Flin Flon and, apart from a brief stint as a clerk in a menswear store when he was in high school, has devoted his entire career running or managing drilling operations.

Cyr was president of Midwest Drilling for nearly a decade before it was acquired by Major Drilling in 1997 and he stayed on with Major as regional and general manager until 2003. A year later he founded his own firm. “It’s been a very, very rewarding experience, to say the least,” Cyr notes. “We actually started the company to service a contract in China. The clients were people I had known in my career. They contacted me and asked me if I could put together a two-rig program on the Tibetan Plateau.”

Cyr had the experience and reputation to meet the needs of the client. His biggest challenge was raising the money necessary to get started. “One of the things that surprised me,” he says, “was that the financial community doesn’t seem to appreciate knowledge and experience. Banks don’t follow the entrepreneurial spirit the way they used to, or have the seasoned people they once had supporting start-up businesses. Today, they focus on templates and checking off boxes.”

Cyr had to rent the two aged rigs for his first Canadian contract — a project that started in January 2005 on the frozen surface of Shoal Lake, an extension of Lake of the Woods on the Ontario-Manitoba border. Unfortunately, the equipment broke down so often that his crews were unable to deliver the required footage to the client.

Cyr Drilling quickly rebounded from that setback. The company has acquired a reputation as a reliable, cost-competitive contractor and has grown accordingly. It now operates a fleet of 15 rigs and the payroll has risen to 120 employees, all of them well trained and grounded in health and safety issues. The company uses 1984 Enterprises of Vancouver as its safety consultant and the firm routinely audits drill sites to ensure that workers are following proper procedures.

“We are constantly upgrading our training, as well as our health and safety program,” Cyr says. “We have had a very, very low accident rate in our company over the past four years.”

He is also committed to environmentally sound practices and the company rigorously adheres to the guidelines established by the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada.

In the fall of 2008, Cyr Drlling or its subsidiaries were drilling at mineral exploration sites in the James Bay lowlands of northwestern Ontario, in northern Saskatchewan near La Ronge, in British Columbia north of the city of Prince George and in Greenland, where mining companies are searching for deposits of zinc and gold. But Cyr’s home base — the province of Manitoba — remains one of the most active jurisdictions for the company.

“There has been an increase in activity in the province,” he says.

“Some of that is attributable to provincial government policies, but generally it’s due to the mineral resources that are located here. The mining community in Manitoba is quite vibrant and healthy.”

Cyr Drilling has worked for junior, intermediate and major mining companies in the province and has conducted exploratory work in unproven areas that contain promising anomalies, as well as on lands where there are well established mines.

One of those juniors was Toronto-based Pure Nickel Inc., which owns a portfolio of advanced exploration and development projects. Cyr conducted a drilling program for the company east of the community of Gillam in the winter of 2007 and a more extensive effort this past winter near William Lake.

Pure Nickel’s William Lake property consists of 148 claims, embracing 30,890 hectares all told and covers the Thompson Nickel Belt extension. Cyr ran three rigs over a 3 1/2-month period, starting in December 2007, and set up a 35-man camp on the site. By early April, the company completed 15 holes totalling 7,525 metres.

In the fall of 2007, Cyr put one rig into operation north of Snow Lake, which is located between Thompson and Flin Flon and after Christmas added a second rig to the project. In this case, the drill company was working for Murgor Resources Inc of Montreal, a mid-sized enterprise whose strategy, according to its website, is to acquire advanced, near production zinc, copper and gold properties and to work them to the stage where they are ready for production. “They had a definite amount of meterage they needed done as quickly as possible, which is why we put the second drill in,” says Cyr. All told, his employees drilled in excess of 10,000 metres in 3 1/2 months.

At the same time, Cyr was also working east of Gillam for Callinan Mines of Vancouver, which has been in the exploration business in Canada for 80 years. “It’s an area of interest,” says Cyr. “There are no operating mines at present in the immediate vicinity.”

His crews drilled half a dozen holes, each of them one to two kilometres apart, a project complicated by the fact that there are no roads in the area. Therefore, the rigs had to be disassembled and moved from site to site by helicopters with a load-bearing capacity of 2,700 pounds. One such relocation took 12 to 15 trips, which is an arduous process. As Cyr notes: “If you forget a pipe wrench you’ve got to go back and get it.”

Most recently, Cyr Drilling undertook a three-hole contract, deepest of which went down more than 1,000 metres, on Vale Inco property in Thompson. “In this case, they were looking for an extension to existing ore bodies,” says Cyr.

From a peak of five rigs operating in northern Manitoba last winter, the company was down to just one in the province this fall, but Cyr expects that will change with the onset of winter as he was bidding on several promising jobs.