Good morning. My name is Christie, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the fiscal 2013 second quarter earnings conference call. [Operator Instructions] Mr. Joe Bennett, you may begin your conference.

Thank you, Christie. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Tidewater's fiscal 2013 second quarter earnings results conference call for the period ended September 30, 2012. I'm Joe Bennett, Tidewater's Executive Vice President and Chief Investor Relations Officer. With me this morning on the call are our President and CEO, Jeff Platt; Jeff Gorski, our Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer; Quinn Fanning, our Executive Vice President and CFO; and Bruce Lundstrom, our Executive Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary. We will follow our usual conference call format. After the formalities, I'll turn the call over to Jeff for his initial comments, to be followed by Quinn's review of the financial details for the quarter. Jeff will then provide some wrap-up comments before we open the call for questions. During today's conference call, Jeff, Quinn, I and other Tidewater management may make certain comments that are forward-looking statements and not statements of historical fact. I know that you understand that there are risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the company's actual future performance to be materially different from that stated or implied by any comment that we may make during today's conference call. Additional information concerning the factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those stated or implied by the forward-looking statements may be found in the Risk Factors section of Tidewater's most recent Form 10-K. With that, I'll turn the call over to Jeff.

Thank you, Joe, and good morning to everyone. First, I would like to thank you for taking time out on this very important election day to participate in our earnings call. Earlier this morning, we reported fully diluted earnings per share for our second fiscal quarter of $0.83 per share compared to the year-ago quarter's net loss per share of $0.10, which was inclusive of a $0.43 per share noncash goodwill impairment charge. Our vessel revenues were in excess of $300 million, which reflects solid improvement from the $290 million in vessel revenues we generated in the preceding quarter. Our results were consistent with our expectations and within the fairway of the guidance we outlined during our last earnings call. As you will learn from Quinn's discussion of this quarter's financial results, there was some noise in the quarter but the results reflect continued progress in the upturn for the offshore supply vessel industry that we have anticipated and highlighted for you in past calls and presentations. As a reminder, we have pointed out over the last several calls that you can see the progress in the industry's recovery if you look at our annual vessel revenues divided by half year periods. In the first half of fiscal '12, our quarterly vessel revenues averaged about $250 million. During the second half of fiscal '12, our vessel revenues were averaging about $280 million per quarter. For the first half of fiscal 2013, we have averaged quarterly vessel revenues of about $300 million. These results reflect steady although not dramatic improvements that tend to be the nature of our industry's business cycle. Once again, a key element in our improved earnings results is control over our vessel operating costs. Improving industry fundamentals, which I will discuss later in the call, coupled with…

Thank you, Jeff. Good morning, everyone. First, I'll call your attention to the earnings press release again that we put out this morning prior to market's opening. I'll also note that we expect to file our quarterly report on Form 10-Q through the EDGAR filing service sometime before the close of business today. Turning to financial results as of and for the 3-month period ended September 30, 2012. As usual, I will provide a recap of the quarter just completed, offer a few perspectives on what's driving financial results and then provide our near to intermediate term outlook. I'll conclude my remarks with a review of capital commitments and available liquidity. As Jeff noted in his introductory remarks, we reported diluted earnings per common share of $0.83 in the September quarter versus diluted earnings per common share of $0.65 in the June quarter. I believe that the consensus of analysts' estimates for the September quarter for Thomson First Call was $0.74. For your period-to-period comparisons, I'll highlight just a few items from the September quarter. Vessel revenue for the September quarter was about $310 million versus about $290 million for the June quarter. As noted in our press release, September vessel revenue includes approximately $7.4 million of revenue associated with retroactive rate increases that were agreed to in the September quarter but related to the period January 1 to June 30, 2012. While revenue recognition in regards to retroactive portion of these rate increases is out of period, I'm not sure I'd consider this revenue to be "unusual" in the conventional sense. Nonetheless, the diluted EPS impact of the out-of-period revenue, net of associated out-of-period costs, was plus $0.10. Relative to guidance provided in early August, vessel revenue, as reported, was at the high end of the range that was…

Thanks, Quinn. As I said at the outset of this call, our quarterly results are a reflection of the continued improvement in the offshore vessel market and for Tidewater in particular. The outlook for our business is tied directly to the health of the offshore exploration and development business. To understand the health of the offshore vessel market, one needs to look at the number of working offshore drilling rigs as a proxy for industry activity. At the present time, the worldwide offshore drilling rig fleet is averaging about a 74% utilization rate, with drillship utilization at 86%, semi-utilization at 78% and jack-up utilization at 74%. Importantly for the future, there are over 180 new floaters and jack-up rigs under construction, with about half of them scheduled to be delivered within the next 2 years. This is a huge financial commitment to offshore exploration and development being made by the industry and, we believe, a strong signal as to the longer-term outlook for the supply vessel business despite a variety of near to intermediate term challenges. We, of course, have been monitoring this global drilling rig fleet expansion, and we regularly dialogue with key operators in order to make sure that we have the types of support vessels that our clients will need. As Quinn mentioned in his discussion, during the September quarter, we committed to 8 additional vessels for our fleet, divided evenly between towing supply vessels for shallow water support and deepwater PSVs, which reflects our assessment of both future customer requirements and vessel supply outlook. While we remain a bit cautious in regards to future supply demand dynamics for the higher horsepower AHTS segment, the deepwater PSV market is relatively strong despite recent deliveries and a relatively large global order book. With further improvement in the jack-up…

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Todd Scholl with Clarkson Capital Markets.

This is actually Haithum Nokta filling in for Todd. I just had a quick question on the Gulf of Mexico. We've seen some of your competitors deploy capital in terms of newbuilds and upgrading vessels in the Gulf. Do you -- has that deterred you from moving any of your international U.S. flag vessels to the Gulf?

No.

Okay. And do you have any kind of guidance on how you feel about moving assets back to the Gulf?

Well, just like we do with all of our areas around the world, we look at the U.S. Gulf of Mexico as another operating area to the extent that the contracts and the job certainly merit moving the equipment, we'll do so. But again, there's no bias for or against the market. It's looking at the best place to have the vessels employed.

Okay. And I was hoping you could expand a little bit on what you were saying about the delays in Brazil and how that kind of affects the rig guys and you.

Well, I think -- there's a couple of things, and I don't want to drill too deep into the granularity of it for us. Overall, we've seen over the last several years and we've stated that rates in Brazil really did not warrant or could not justify moving the type of equipment into it, and Tidewater has not done it. Other people have rushed into Brazil or moved to Brazil, and I think the results speak for themselves. For Tidewater, recently, over the most recent several tenders, we saw a rebound in the rates, rates that would justify from an economic standpoint, from our perspective, moving back into Brazil. So we participated in tenders and it appears that we have been awarded work. The delay that I'm talking about that Quinn referenced was within Petrobras. There has been some additional bureaucracy in the award process or the execution of the contracts and that's caused delays, not just for Tidewater, but for the industry as a general. Not just vessel operators, but I think most service companies are having those same type of delays. So it's that delay that Quinn was referring to.

Your next question comes from the line of Jon Donnel with Howard Weil.

For further on that Brazil question there a little bit, if we could, is there a specific asset class for you guys that that's most affecting? And is this any of the newbuilds that we've seen recent deliveries on that are getting these delays as well or is it more spread throughout the vessel fleet?

Jon, as I said, I don't want to go into granularity. But in general, it's not necessarily the new vessels that are being delivered and it's primarily in deepwater PSVs. And then that's about as much detail as I'd like to give.

And to add to that, as I mentioned in my prepared remarks, utilization in our deepwater AHTS class was down significantly quarter-over-quarter, and that in part reflects Brazil, as I previously mentioned. Stepping back a bit, we're talking about a handful of vessels here for Tidewater, significant issue for the industry. But for us at least, some of the vessels which we have letters of intent are in Brazil and some of them have not yet mobilized to Brazil. And as is the case, in every letter of intent with Petrobras, there's a validity period. And if the vessel hasn't gone on charter by the time the validity period is over, we'll evaluate our options, and in all cases, we'll do so in very close coordination with Petrobras.

Okay. And are any of the other deepwater platform supply vessels that are scheduled for delivery here in the next couple of quarters plan to be going to Brazil as well?

Jon, again, we don't get into the detail contract by contract, so I hesitate to say that, but I will answer your question this time. The answer is no. Okay? The answer is no.

That's very good to hear. And then just a little bit if we could on the retroactive rate increases. Can you give a little bit of detail on maybe what asset class those were in? It looks like it was more of the towing supply, supply just based on the adjusted day rates you gave. But was there any particular region or customer that we saw those concentrated in?

As you'll see when we file our quarterly report, it's most prevalent in the Sub-Saharan Africa, Europe segment, and we won't go beyond it. It doesn't cover a handful of vessels. It's numerous vessels, and it covers both deepwater vessels and towing supply and supply vessels, as well as some of the other class of equipment. [indiscernible] equipment and it's focused on that geography.

Your next question comes from the line of Jeff Tillery with Tudor, Pickering and Holt. Jeff Tillery - Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Co. Securities, Inc., Research Division: As you think of -- I mean, setting aside the December quarter and kind of the heavy dry dock load, as you think about path as we get this year into early next from a counter standpoint, do you guys see utilization for Tidewater in aggregate in the low 70%? I mean, is that -- as we get through these dry docks, do we finally kind of tick up through that 70% marker?

Actually, I think the -- I don't mean to be flip about this, we basically have 2 businesses. One is operating offshore supply vessels and one is disposing of old assets. What we focus on is the active fleet, and we have seen very consistently mid to high 80% utilization both the deepwater class equipment and the towing supply and supply class equipment. And that drives, as we've discussed, 90-plus percent of our revenue and asset base. So I would encourage you to think about it as we do, which is we've got a disposition exercise with a stacked fleet, which we have been prosecuting on a very deliberate basis. And I guess the good news is we've got a very few active older OSVs from the fleet. I think last quarter, we highlighted the fact that it was 20, and it's below 20 now. We certainly have other non-OSVs such as crew boats and tugs that are also in the active fleet, and that's probably 20, 23, if I had to guess, today. But the active fleet, which is what drives revenue margin, is essentially at or very close to full utilization. And has been the case in the industry in the past, you need to get to full utilization before you can push price. You need to be at full utilization as an industry. I would say Tidewater is there today. The rest of the industry is there in regards to deepwater class and getting there very quickly in regards to towing supply and supply class. We've seen rates move on the deepwater side, and we're hopeful that it will start to move on the towing supply and supply side. Jeff Tillery - Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Co. Securities, Inc., Research Division: I apologize. I guess I asked my question poorly. I didn't really intend to ask on the utilization number. But it's kind of been a flat line in terms of the total days worked in terms of the last kind of 5-or-so quarters. I was curious if you see that day work, those days work, as you take new delivery of vessels. Is there enough offset, so we finally start seeing kind of the aggregate days work for the company ticking up as we get beyond these dry docks?

That's a reasonable assumption. I mean, over the last 5, 6 years, we've kind of been stacking or disposing of 2 older vessels for every new one that we've delivered. Obviously, that newer vessel is earning significantly higher day rates and has more significant cargo capacity so on and so forth. But if you look at the last couple of quarters, our new deliveries and vessels going to stacked [indiscernible] push. I mean, I would expect as we run out of older vessels to stack or dispose of, that you'll start seeing actual active vessel count grow at least modestly, and certainly, days work will follow. Jeff Tillery - Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Co. Securities, Inc., Research Division: Was the Gulf of Mexico storm-related downtime enough to be noticeable in aggregate for it to impact the second -- the September quarter? I was just curious if that was something that you guys think about as being a big enough number to call out?

No, most of our contracts in the Gulf, again, are some deepwater equipment. Those are term contracts. We did not see any type of utilization drop-off or the flip-side spike, any kind of storm-related activity. Jeff Tillery - Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Co. Securities, Inc., Research Division: And then last question, you guys gave a lot of numbers around the CapEx side. Just looking for the aggregate CapEx expectations for this fiscal year.

Actually, I think I gave $107 million number for the December quarter. We do have a table embedded in the Q that will lay out at least the next 4 quarters in terms of quarterly CapEx based again on commitments as of 9/30. Certainly, if we add to our commitments, that would at some point at least drive up CapEx. But for the near-term quarter, it's $107 million and just my recollection is a little slightly less than that in the March quarter, but that would be a moving target based on commitments made.

Your next question comes from the line of Greg Lewis with Crédit Suisse. Gregory Lewis - Crédit Suisse AG, Research Division: Jeff, could you talk a little bit about what's going on in Asia Pacific? And I guess what I'm wondering is, it looked like day rates for the deepwater in Asia Pacific gapped up about $10,000 sequentially, which was offset by declines in utilization in Asia Pacific. If you could just sort of provide a little bit more color on that? I think that would be pretty helpful.

Well, in the Asia Pacific, of course, we have Australia in that mix. And in Australia, there are some labor costs typically that become a rebillable item. So I think we're seeing some of that in the quarter to account for some of that, that you mentioned, Greg. Gregory Lewis - Crédit Suisse AG, Research Division: Okay. So that wasn't a function of just higher earning vessels in the quarter, which sort of drove up that rate increase? So in other words, I guess my question is, if we saw utilization trend back up in APAC, we could actually see that day rate hold?

There's a part of it that's in there. Part of the labor rebuild, there are some bonus-type payments that get paid as part of the -- again, that's the union labor contracts. So that, of course, is not a recurring on a day-to-day or month-to-month. But again, we still see the overall trending moving up on the deepwater equipment even in that region of the world as well. Gregory Lewis - Crédit Suisse AG, Research Division: Okay, perfect. And then you touched on it briefly about Tidewater potentially evolving and meeting client needs. I guess we saw a private -- a large private OSV operator sort of do a joint venture with an oil service company about broadening out their array of services in the -- it looked like it was targeted towards subsea market. Is that something that Tidewater's thinking about exploring as a potential evolution of the company at this point? Or is it probably still a little bit too early to be thinking about that?

Greg, we have for quite some time, and we continue to look at all aspects of the industry and the space that we occupy and the client base we have, so everything is a fair game. So for us to say that, that is new or eminent, it's not new for us to look at that and look at other opportunities, and we'll continue to do so. We are in that space today, too. It's not like that's something that would be absolutely new way down the road. We actually participate in some of that today.

Your next question comes from the line of Richard Sanchez with IHS.

Richard Sanchez with IHS. My question -- I hate to keep harping on it, is on Brazil. On those vessels that are awaiting Petrobras contract awards, will any of those vessels be available on the spot market?

Well, actually if they're not on contract currently and we're waiting on Petrobras, they are, in fact, on a spot market basis. Again, in Brazil, the spot market is relatively limited. It's not that there's a large opportunity for it, but your assumption is correct, Richard.

And then my other question is regarding vessel operating costs in the United States and in Brazil. You guys had mentioned that there had been an increase in operating costs, and I was wondering if that was an actual increase in individual operating costs or if it was sort of a broader thing?

I mean, I think, Richard, we talked about it. It's predominantly wage pressure, and we see that across -- in our operating environment, predominantly in the United States, in Brazil and Australia are really the 3 most difficult areas, not just for Tidewater, but for the industry. Did that answer your question, Richard?

Yes. And then my other question was regarding Brazil. I understand repair and maintenance -- access to repair and maintenance shipyards in Brazil has been more difficult lately. And I was wanting to know if Tidewater had experienced any of that. I'd seen some other companies, seemed that they'd actually been mobilizing vessels out of Brazil for repair or maintenance and then actually returning them to work back to Brazil.

Richard, we've been in Brazil a long time, and I was actually the country manager there for a period. And the access to dry dock facilities for repair is not something that's new. It's been a problem in Brazil. People that have not operated for a long period of time, they say that, that's a recent phenomena. But overall, that's been an issue for some time. So it's not a new term issue. Obviously, moving equipment out of Brazil to find other dry dock facilities for repair, it's a pretty long haul to other areas, so that gets pretty expensive as well. But I don't doubt that other people may have looked at that as an option.

Your next question comes from the line of Cole Sullivan with ISI Group.

I had a question and I think somebody already answered at least part of this. On the Asia Pacific fleet, on the -- I know you talked about the deepwater day rate increase there versus the June quarter. On the towing supply, supply, you had, I don't know, roughly a 1,500 a day decline there. Can you give any color on what drove that and if that was more of a dry docking mix issue?

Cole, I'd have to circle up with you. I don't have regions by asset class in front of me, but I don't recall, quite frankly, significant day rate drop in Asia Pac in that class of equipment.

Okay. And then also on the...

There is nothing that jumps out in terms of an operational issue.

Okay. So it just could be a mix or something?

As Jeff has indicated in the past, what we include in Asia Pacific is a lot of different things, and probably most significantly, Australia falls there, which is largely a large equipment and deepwater market. And it's really the rest of Asia Pac, which is Southeast Asia, et cetera, et cetera, where you see a lot of our towing supply and supply activity. And actually, that's a market that's, I would say, moving generally in the same direction as the rest of the globe. It's taking a little bit longer for it to get utilization traction largely because that's where a lot of the new equipment is being built. But no, I don't recall a significant movement in day rates one way or another. So I apologize for that.

Okay. That's all right. And then on the Sub-Saharan Africa segment where you had mentioned some of the day rate -- retroactive day rates. How should we think about that going forward? And is the Q going to include some of the adjustment there that we can kind of back out as to how much was retroactive?

It won't. And I think there's a couple of points that's worth making is we've highlighted the retroactive portion of what our otherwise rate increases that we will benefit from a go-forward basis. We don't have much of adjusted data in the quarterly -- the intended quarterly filing, so you'll have to rely on the transcript for that. But it's really -- we experienced this to a smaller degree, I believe, in the June quarter of 2012, but my recollection was a $2 million or $2.5 million benefit to us. And it's really just the way the calendar works sometimes with clients is that we have fleet negotiations that go past the expiry date on the contracts. And so we'll continue to work and as we work things up through our own chain of command and then the clients' chain of command and finally reach to an agreement on rates. They have been retroactive to the start date or the rollover date of contracts. And again, this year, we recognized a more significant retroactive portion of a rate increase, but we did experience it to a smaller degree in fiscal '12. And it's just very possible that we would experience it on a go-forward basis, but it's very difficult to predict when and then what magnitude.

Our last question comes from the line of Matt Conlan with Wells Fargo Securities.

So just a little bit of housekeeping here. When you say that the adjusted rates of -- for example, for the deepwater, the adjusted rates were up $2,400 a day versus the $2,700 a day increases shown in the stats with the retroactive revenue in there. I assume that your adjustments only have adjusted the rates for the September quarter? Have they also adjusted upwards the rates for the June quarter for the revenue increases they should have had in those quarters?

No. The rates that I gave you on an adjusted basis were to back out the retroactive effects for the September quarter, and the changes that I gave you were as compared to reported that we provided in the past.

Okay, terrific. Just wanted to make absolutely crystal clear that we're on the same page there. And then separately, could you provide the utilization and day rate stats for the 101 new generation towing supply and supply vessels? You gave stats for the full fleet of 177, but in recent presentations you have provided just a breakout of those new generation vessels.

I don't have it at my fingertips, but my guess is that charts that we've used in the past investor presentations, we'll use in future investor presentations. But remember that, yes, there are working older vessels particularly in the towing supply and supply fleet for you, but it's not huge numbers.

You're right, it definitely skews utilization downward though.

Yes, but the active utilization that I gave you includes very few active older vessels. And including the active older vessels, we're still in the mid to high 80s at this point. It's 86.9% for towing supply and supply overall in terms of active vessels. And if I had to guess, if you strip out the older ones, you'd have a very, very small positive impact on what is new active towing supply and supply vessels. But you can't get past 92%, 93% on any sustained basis when you think about dry dock time, so we're talking about inches here.

There are no further questions at this time.

Christie, thank you very much, and thank everyone again for tuning in on this busy election day.

This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.