Michael Hudner is targeting a $200m return to the market in medium-range (MR) products tankers.

The former shipowner, who has been through the good and bad times in a 40-year career, told TW+ that he and his daughter, Bay, are working with the core B+H management team to attract investors to a play on five to 10-year-old tankers.

“We’re going back to our roots,” Hudner told TW+ at the offices of his B+H Group in Bristol, Rhode Island.

B+H operated as many as 20 products tankers in the late 1990s and has owned nearly 50 over the course of Hudner’s career — before going through a 2012 Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing that saw him sell the last B+H ships in 2013.

Hudner is bullish about prospects for five to 10-year old MRs in the 47,000-dwt to 52,000-dwt range believing that, although the products market has begun a recovery, a shortage of available financing has prevented valuations from lifting off from trough levels.

B+H is seeking $200m to splash on a fleet of about 20 MRs in a 50:50 debt-equity play. Hudner sees estimated annual cash-on-cash returns of 11% to 24% on a five-year-old vessel, with internal rates of return ranging from 26% and 34% on a 10-year-old tanker.

It is said that everyone loves a comeback story but, despite having seen it all — from groundbreaking financial innovations to a major oil spill, the high times of peak markets and tough times of troughs — the Hudner pairing has not yet been able to clinch an investment deal.

Hudner says B+H has been close with eight or nine potential deals but has been told the main reason for financiers not participating is “they’re worried about what the investors will think of getting involved in a shipping deal".

A source in the tanker-finance market agrees with Hudner’s assessment of why the project has not yet been funded.

“The issue has been getting investors interested in shipping,” he said. “It’s incredibly hard today to convince an investor that he should invest in steel. Any time someone did in the last five years, they lost money.”

Clearly fuelling the comeback drive is the bitter taste in Hudner’s mouth his company's 2012 Chapter 11 filing.

Not long afterwards, Hudner was hit by the news that his wife, Hope, had terminal brain cancer, followed by a period in which he and Bay cared for her until her death.

The combination of events looks to have left Hudner, 70, with both the time and motivation to make one more run at a return to shipowning — the profession he chose after a start in the world of real estate.

Whether he owns ships or not, Hudner always has his trusty 61-foot sloop Moonracer, either for entry into the challenging Newport Bermuda Race — from Newport in Rhode Island to the British island territory in the Atlantic — or an easy cruise on Narragansett Bay, where he showed TW+ that he still knows what he is doing behind the wheel.