The next Australian to walk up three steps and be struggling to catch their breath, high up in the mountains. Thanks for having us at the Precious Metals Summit and, yeah, looking forward to the presentation. Look, talk a bit about Bellevue. You know, we've spent a lot of time, I mean, Mick just talked about Victoria being a good jurisdiction. I think the fundamental idea of Western Australia being a good place to do business is the fact that we were able to take this mine from discovery through to production in under six years. You know, it's a pretty phenomenal thing to be able to do. We've been in production now for less than two years, so we're right at that sort of tail end of the ramp-up period.
I think you'll see, hopefully from this presentation and what we're doing, that we have a pretty strong future ahead of us and a future of growing production and growing cash flow coming up. I like this picture on the front, not just because you can see the beautiful wind turbines that we built, but all this infrastructure that you see here is under three years old and it was built to be here for a long time. This is a mine that we're confident is going to be here for decades. I'll show you why we're confident on that as part of the presentation. All the disclaimers are on the ASX. I think that, for the people in the room here that sort of aren't familiar with the Western Australian gold fields, Bellevue is in a prime position of real estate in the northern goldfields.
It's just north of a mine called Agnew, which is owned by Gold Fields Limited. Agnew is very well known in Western Australia for being a mine that's had a three-year mine life for the past 35 years. We're the closest mine to that up to the north, but that Agnew-Willunna greenstone belt goes up to Willunna and Jundi up to the north, which are 10 million ounce systems. We've discovered 3 million ounces at Bellevue just from drilling on the surface, and we're confident that when we get the proper drilling positions underground, we're going to be able to drill that out even further. We come into FY2026 with a strong balance sheet. We do have a hedge position, so we've got about 150,000 ounces of hedging.
The profiles in our ASX presentation, but we can easily, you know, fund those hedges through delivery, and still produce good cash flow. As I said, the ramp-up and the, you know, the learnings of building the mine and the learnings of the geology have been, sort of something that we've gone through over the past couple of years, and we're in a really strong position heading into FY2026 and 2027 to really see some production growth and some cash flow growth as well. As I said, everything's less than three years old here, and it's going to be around for a long time. The team is super excited about getting underground and getting some exploration done, and I'll make sure I cover off on that as part of this as well.
Look, what I want to first talk about, I think this slide's a really important one in the deck because it talks about, I guess, the journey over the past 12 months and, you know, where we were heading into FY2025, and now where we are going into FY2026 and beyond. You know, when we went into FY2025, you know, we were still, you know, building the mine out. We didn't have the key pieces of infrastructure in place. We'd had a couple of very heavy rain events in early 2025, which flooded the old underground workings and meant that underground operations were restricted and we weren't able to get the development in quick enough, in order to get to the high-quality ore bodies on time. We had to go to other areas of the mine to get the dirt to fill and mill.
The Tribune mine, which is a separate mine, we hadn't even taken the box cut, the portal cut there yet. We'd taken the box cut, and we were still sort of learning the processing plant. We'd only been sort of operating for, you know, eight or so months, and, you know, the recovery in the June quarter heading into that year was 90%, which is below the plus 95% that we wanted. We also had, you know, a pretty tight balance sheet, didn't have a lot of cash, had, you know, principal debt repayments coming up. We had a few hedges that we had to deliver into and ended up putting out a, you know, an optimistic target that was ultimately not achieved.
Look, when you go forward to FY2026, and FY2026 and 2027 are relatively similar, but when you look at all the issues that we had going into FY2025 and look at what the position of those were going into 2026, it's chalk and cheese. You know, all of the underground infrastructure is established. The underground mining crews are on site. We have all the equipment, all the people that we need. The development rate that we've put into our forecast plan, we can see the numbers here, are based on a development rate of 270 meters per jumbo per month across the fleet of five jumbos. We have that fleet of five jumbos in now, and we're achieving over 300 meters per month on a month-in, month-out basis now for the last four months. We've established Tribune. Last year was pretty much all development in Tribune.
We're scoping from it all this year. We've done some small upgrades to the processing plant, and we're now achieving plus 95% recovery on a consistent basis. The mine is just running at a really steady level and operating well. When you have a look at what we're talking about, between 2025 and 2026, despite not having a great year last year, we still sold 130,000 ounces. The plan that we're having for this year, despite all these sort of tailwinds and things that are going well, is only pushing it to 130,000 to 150,000, so just a little bit more as we really set the mine up to be able to hit its straps and get down to the high-grade areas. The real big difference between FY2026 and FY2027, which I'll show you in 3D, is that we're getting down to some of the better mining areas.
We're getting into an area called Deakin North, which is a high-grade, low geological complexity, really consistent mining area. That replaces some of the upper-level, sort of lower-quality mining areas that we've been putting in for the past 12 to 18 months. Through doing the same amount of jumbo development, same amount of scoping tons per month, we actually get more ounces. Same cost base, that is, meaning that our cash flow will go up and our profitability will go up considerably just as we go through this FY into next FY. It's probably worth showing the Bellevue load. You can sort of see it here, but there's three distinct underground mining loads that we're looking at. If I put it into this sort of view, we have the Tribune load here, we have the Bellevue load, and we have the Deakin load.
The Deakin load drives a lot of value, is very high-grade and very good. This Deakin load doesn't actually start till you're about 400 to 450 meters below surface. When you have a look at the 3D overview of the mine here, what you can see is distinct mining areas that we'll be mining this financial year. There are one, two, three, four, five, six different underground mining areas. Of the areas, this one is called Armand. That's one of the ones that we have been producing from. It's nearest to surface, and it's fair to say that it's not the highest quality of the mining areas. What you can see as we move into FY2027 and FY2028, and you have a look at that concentration of mining here, you can see that we're just into that on-echelon mining of these five key mining areas.
That's what Bellevue becomes for a number of years: just consistent mining. It's essentially five separate one-jumbo mines that will just continue on. We've got fully mine design, mine scheduled out until the mid-2030s here. You have a look at this. This is all just chasing the resources that we discovered while we were drilling from surface. This is an arcane load gold deposit that plunges to the south down this way. All of this area isn't drilled. We haven't had the platforms to be able to drill it out yet, and building these platforms is part of the plan for FY2026. We'll really start to see some of those areas going. One thing, as I said, it's key to point out is the fact that the ore body, the really good stuff, starts circa 400, 450 meters below surface here.
Setting up these mining fronts where all this value is, is really the key achievement that we're going to do over the course of FY2026 to drive that production growth into FY2027. To show it on a heat map of the geology here, you can see our key mining areas. This is called Marceline. This is Deakin North, and this is Deakin over here. If you have a look at the mining levels that we're actually on at the moment, we're essentially around this area around here. We're moving into the part of the ore body where you're seeing plus 4,000 ounce per vertical meter starting to come into the plan over the next 12 months and then continuing beyond that. We're only going to be mining about 50 meters per year out of this section, vertical advance. There's a lot to come.
You go to the Viago area, which is another big growth area. We're mining about the 980 level of that at the moment. You can see we're coming in Viago as well into those very high ounce per vertical meter areas. You're talking plus 2,000 ounce per vertical meter in the levels just below where we are right now from that area as well. Why do we have this sort of increased geological confidence in what we're doing? The fact is we've drilled a hell of a lot of it. Now that we've got this development ahead of the production areas and we're starting to get the drill platforms ahead of our mining fronts, we're able to do a lot of grade control drilling.
We're drilling about 4,500 meters a week at the moment of grade control drilling, five underground drill rigs, and we're getting big hits all across these areas. What you can see there is in gray what we've mined. This is the key Deakin area. We mined four levels of Deakin last year because it was the main game, which is about 80 meters vertical. As I said, we're now slowing that down. We're pushing the decline out well in front of our production areas, but we're only mining two and a half levels, so circa 50 meters advanced this year in that main Deakin area. That just sets up for consistent delivery year in year going forward. This really is the year of getting ahead, and next year will be the year of getting absolute significant returns for all the hard work that we've done year in year out.
I can show you the same dot plots, and you can see these massive amounts of high-grade hits ahead of where we are. This is Deakin North, where we haven't even struck a blow yet, and you can see significant widths, significant grade, and it looks exactly like Deakin. That really comes into the plan to replace our mine next year, which will drive up the ounce profile coming out of Bellevue. It is an exploration conference, so I want to talk a little bit about some of the exploration targets that we've had. It's been a similar story on exploration for a while with Bellevue, in that we know that there's some big massive targets that we can start to go after.
We just haven't been in a position where we've been able to drill them because we've been building the mine out and getting those drill platforms in place. One of the unique things about Bellevue is that, you know, it's a very high pyrite ore body. Pyrite is an iron sulfide, and so it's very magnetic. Every single discovery at Bellevue from Tribune back in 2017, through the extensions of the Bellevue lode, Viago, Deakin, have all been found through chasing up these downhole EM vectors with drilling. Where you see the downhole EM at Bellevue, you know you're going to hit pyrite, and there's a one-to-one correlation between pyrite and gold across the asset. We have a bunch of downhole EM targets, particularly as I said, the ore plunges down that way.
We have a bunch of significant downhole EM targets that sit out there that we are going to have platforms to be able to drill within the next 12 months. You know, when I show you those platforms as we go into the mine plan, we'll have one at Deakin North, we'll have this Viago decline, and we'll have the start of that southern belt drill drive, and be in a position where we can actually start to do depth extensions of Deakin North, step extensions of Deakin. We can chase the Deakin South target, which we have downhole EM again to target, and then start chasing all three lodes being, you know, the Tribune lode, the Bellevue lode, and the Deakin lode, to the south there, from the start of that drill drive, which is coming along now.
We've found 3 million ounces, as I said, from drilling that sort of 2.5K strike that you can see there. We have about 2K of strike that we can get with these downhole EM targets. You can sort of see them here in 3D. There's downhole EM targets on every single one of the key lodes that we have out to the south here. We'll be putting a drill drive, as you can see on this slide, right over the top of it. Now you can see that we—this is playing up on me, but I always do this. There's 3 million ounces found here. Could be anything down there. We've just got to get in a position to drill it, which those drill platforms start in the next 12 months.
The other thing that we did as we built the mine, you know, we put out a strategy where we were going to focus on positive ESG outcomes. We've actually built the mine to be a net zero gold mine. It's something that we announced a month ago. We added the world's first net zero gold mine. The purpose of that is, one, it builds good relationships with the governments. It makes it much easier to attract employees. We're also looking to sell some of that gold as a premium product into the market, and we've started on that journey as well. What I hope you see from it is that Bellevue is and remains a very good asset. It's been a high-quality asset for a long time.
It went through that phase of being built, being built out, learning all the nuances of building a new mine, building new infrastructure, building new assets, understanding the geology. We're now in a phase where we're going to start to see some significant returns for all that hard work come in through production growth, through cash flow growth, and then through exploration heading into next year. It's something that me and the team are really excited about. Thank you very much.