Next up, I'm excited to introduce Akiba Leisman. He's the CEO over at Mako Mining. Personally, quite curious to get an update as they recently expanded into the U.S. Akiba, I think you should be right there. Thank you so much for joining us.
Hi, thanks, Guy. Hi, my name is Akiba Leisman. I am the CEO of Mako Mining. As the slide says, we are fully funded gold growers in the Americas. We just recently completed a roughly $37 million financing, which has now buttressed our balance sheet such that we can now use our two operating mines to go and develop our two development projects, all with the cash and cash flow resources that we have in our current portfolio. A couple of distinguishing factors that I do think distinguishes Mako from most junior mining companies. Firstly, we do have a controlling shareholder, Wexford Capital, who I used to work for. They own 47% of the issued and outstanding stock that Mako has. Having a controlling shareholder has been invaluable. I always like to tell investors that in bear markets, you should not expect to make outsized returns.
What you should do is two things: set the pieces on your chessboard when the bull market comes, that you're prepared for it, and don't blow up your capital structure along the way. Having a controlling shareholder with deep pockets in the background allowed us to do that. The second and more important part about Mako is that we do have our own internal engineering, procurement, and construction management team. Usually, juniors are structured as either an exploration company who's trying to develop their exploration asset to eventually sell to a larger company. Nothing wrong with that. Likewise, to the extent that somebody is going to be looking at developing a singular asset, they will focus on a singular asset.
We have set up Mako from inception since 2019 to own and operate multiple mines simultaneously, something that I do think is very unique in the small-cap part of the market. We have recently gone on an acquisition strategy such that our original Nicaraguan mine, which has been the cash cow, cash shark, if you will, over the company over the course of the last four years, that allowed us to put ourselves in a position to make three acquisitions over the course of the last 17 months that puts Mako in an enviable position in terms of where our growth strategy is today. A little bit about our balance sheet. We ended Q3 with just under $30 million on our balance sheet. Q3 was a scheduled, relatively weak quarter for Mako.
I've told the market that H2 is going to look a lot like H1, but it's going to be back-end loaded. We will have a particularly strong Q4 coming from our Nicaraguan operations over at San Albino. Likewise, we have just completed a $37 million financing that was underwritten by Stifel and Cantor out of Canada that brought in $37 million to the company. Prior to that financing, we also had $6.5 million of principal debt as well as accrued interest on the balance sheet. We use that as an opportunity, and I'm happy to announce to fully repay all remaining debt at the company. As of this morning, we have approximately $62 million of cash on the balance sheet. We expect to be ending Q4 after a particularly strong Q4 coming from Nicaragua and the ramp-up of one of our U.S.
assets to end the year with just under U.S. $80 million of cash. A little bit about our operating team, Jesse Muñoz. I hired him and his entire family-owned EPCM firm back in 2019 to come on board to be our operating team. There were 16 members of that organization at that time. The internal EPCM firm has grown to about 29 people. We are still a small team. By the way, that's 29 people in an organization that has roughly 700 employees and contractors. This is our brain trust, the people that actually know what they're doing within our operations that's capable of handling multiple operations at once. Jesse and his crew are particularly well-suited to be developing small and medium-scale assets in the Americas, even though we have four in our portfolio right now.
Once we do spend a little bit of time consolidating, inclusive of closing the fourth acquisition over the course of the next week, we will be looking for additional assets to put within the Mako portfolio. Our board and our Chairman is Eric Feary, He's a very successful manager and investor in the mining industry. He has now sold two companies in excess of $1 billion to different silver producers, one back in 2016 to First Majestic, the Silvercrest Mines, and then SilverCrest Metals was recently sold to Coeur Mining. Eric has been very busy in the M&A space, both with his activities over at Mako as well as his activities over at Coeur, inclusive of a very large acquisition that they announced over the course of the last week. A little bit about Nicaragua. San Albino was started up.
We started construction of that at the end of 2019 and declared commercial production on San Albino in July 2021. If you think about those dates, we built this mine that bookended the pandemic. Think about that. We wound up building a mine in Nicaragua without access to the country for effectively four months, and we delivered this project more or less on time, more or less on budget. It allowed us to generate the cash that put Mako into the position that it is right now. We will be releasing our Q3 financials either very late next week or early the week thereafter. You can see over the course of the trailing 12 months, we have generated $57 million of mine site operating cash flow, which allowed us to generate roughly $22 million in free cash flow at much lower gold prices.
This is an operation that generates just under 40,000 ounces a year of production, but those are extremely profitable ounces that allows us to buttress our balance sheet so that we can go and advance our other three projects. Again, $23 million of net income over the course of the last 12 months ending in Q2. On New Year's Eve last year, 2024, we announced the acquisition of the operating Moss Mine in bankruptcy from a company called Elevation Gold. Elevation was an insolvent company. There were a lot of issues with that, both from a balance sheet and operational perspective. We were the winning bidder over bankruptcy. It is complicated how we got there, but the net purchase price was effectively $2 million when we completed the acquisition at the end of March of last year.
I said at the time that was going to be one of the most accretive transactions that we've seen in mining on a percentage basis. I think that comment that I made has held up over the course of the last 11 months. What is Moss? Moss was a fully operational heap leach mine in northwest Arizona. They had a 9,000-ton-a-day three-stage crushing plant, heap leach, and Merrill Crowe recovery system to get out the gold and silver from this operation. They were averaging approximately 35,000 ounces a year of gold equivalents in the preceding five years to bankruptcy. They encumbered their balance sheet with all sorts of really nasty and gnarly debt, inclusive of streams and royalties. It was not going to be a company that would survive in any gold price environment, inclusive of the one that we're experiencing right now. It needed to restructure.
Fortunately, we have a company that's run by people that actually know what restructuring is about. We actually do have our operating headquarters based in Arizona. We had deep knowledge of this asset going back over a decade. When the inevitable bankruptcy was going to be coming, we were prepared to make a bid, and we were prepared to insert our operating team to not only restructure the balance sheet, but to restructure the operations to make it profitable. I'm happy to announce that mining has recommenced in July on a single shift. We have added a second shift of mining approximately two weeks ago. We will be operating at 24 hours a day over the course of the next two weeks. We will be approaching steady-state production somewhere around the second half of Q1 of next year.
Very, very late February or early March, we will be approaching steady-state production. We do actually require an EA permit amendment in order for us to access some of the relatively higher—it's a low-grade mine—but relatively higher-grade parts of the deposit. We have not been able to get that permit during the government shutdown. Hopefully, the U.S. government will get back to work this week, in which case we do think it's going to be a matter of priority for the Kingman Office Bureau of Land Management to give us that permit. If that's the case, then we should be getting grades that would support a roughly 30,000-35,000 ounces a year of gold equivalent mining operation in Nicaragua, again, with no additional capital beyond that $2 million that we needed to spend for the acquisition.
Not a single cent other than a $1.4 million advance payment that we made to our mining contractors come from corporate to go and finance any of the activities that we needed to do over at Moss because it's still been generating revenue and cash flow from the residual leach operation. Likewise, Moss is permitted on an area of disturbance of about 493 acres. That being said, we have nearly 40,000 acres of prospective ground within this volcanic caldera that we do think discoveries have been made over at site by our predecessor. We are going to be following up on that to add additional resource into our mine plan. We should have an updated reserve and pre-feasibility study out. We're a little bit behind schedule, likely either very end of December or January of next year.
That will show an initial pretty reasonable mine life, but really that's just a postage stamp of what we think this property is capable of delivering. In February of 2024, the first acquisition that we made, we announced the acquisition of another public company called Goldsource Mines by issuing 13.1 million shares to acquire them. They had 1.8 million ounces in all categories included in FERT ounces. In January of 2024, they put out a public PEA one month prior to the announcement of our acquisition. That was a subset, a 1.1 million ounce subset of that 1.8 million ounces that showed an NPV of roughly $300 million with a $96 million upfront CapEx to deliver what was essentially a 65,000 ounce a year on average production, 14 and a half year mine life. The dark blue that you see on the screen right now is saprolite only.
That will be easy to process, relatively low cost material. We do think that that four-year saprolite only window will get compressed into three. The first couple of years of operations, you're going to be looking at something that may be in excess of 80,000 ounces a year of production. We do think the CapEx to get the initial saprolite only operation up and running will be in and around $100 million. How are we going to fund $100 million with $60 million on our balance sheet right now? Good thing we have cash-flowing assets to do that, inclusive of an acquisition that we announced at the end of September. We are acquiring the Mount Hamilton project, fully permitted gold and tungsten project in Nevada from a private equity company based out of Canada.
This is a little bit of a complicated transaction in terms of how this came about, but Mako does have an affiliated royalty company that's called Sailfish Royalty Corp, which I serve as the Executive Chairman of Wexford Capital, the controlling shareholder of Mako, also owns approximately 70% of Sailfish. Sailfish will be acquiring Mount Hamilton for $40 million of cash. They will be closing that deal as early as Friday of this week, maybe early next week, depending on when we have TSX.B approval. Immediately after them acquiring that asset, they will be vending that asset to Mako in return for a five-year gold stream, 4,100 ounces of gold per year at 20% of the spot price of gold, subject to a cap at $3,700 an ounce, which means at today's gold price, Sailfish will be entitled to less than 4,100 ounces.
After that five-year gold stream is complete, Mako will pay Sailfish a 2% net smelter return royalty on the back of Mount Hamilton. Mount Hamilton, fully permitted, ready to go. We are anticipating beginning construction of this in March of next year. Pardon the imperial units. If you convert that to metric units, that is 0.7 grams a ton. This is a high-grade heap leach project, oxide project, ready to go, two-stage crush, heap leach, absorption-dissorption recovery plant. We think the max capital drawdown to get this into first gold pour will be in and around $85 million. We will start construction in March to deliver first gold pour sometime in either very late 2026 or very early 2027.
Scoping this out at a 10,000-ton-a-day operation, which we think we can do, that will equate to roughly 60,000 ounces of production based on our expectations for recovery. That being said, Mount Hamilton is not really a gold mine. Mount Hamilton is kind of an interesting geology where you have two scarns. The one on top has been overprinted by a gold-silver epithermal deposit, which is where the 600,000 ounces lie, although we do think there's reasonable exploration potential to take that to between 1 to 1.2 million ounces. The scarn underneath is a tungsten deposit. This was extensively drilled out in the 1960s to 1970s by a petroleum exploration company named Phillips Petroleum. They did develop a historical reserve back in the late 1970s.
We do think this has the potential to be one of the largest tungsten and high-grade tungsten assets within the continental 48 that allows us to have some conversations with the U.S. government about potential finance or permitting support. Those conversations are ongoing, which leads me to the conclusion as to what Mako is right now. We have one fully operating mine over in San Albino, which serves as our cash shark. We have a ramping-up operation over at Moss, which is basically at full run rates from a mining perspective, and it will be approaching steady-state production in and around February or March next year. We have a fully permitted project that will start construction in March of next year that will be delivering first gold pour either in very late 2026, early 2027.
We will use the cash in our balance sheet, inclusive of the $37 million that we raised, $30 million net of the debt repayment, as well as the cash flow resources coming from all three assets to go build our $100 million project over at Eagle Mountain. We have a fully funded gold growth in the Americas with tungsten optionality.
Fantastic. Awesome. Akiba, 15 seconds left. One quick question.
We don't. Awesome. Great. Thank you so much.
Great. Thanks so much.