When Gene Rankin was a Coast Guard reservist years ago, stationed in the United States, he heard the story of how the Coast Guard sailors who served in the South China Sea would get dragons sewn into the cuff of their dress uniforms.

Rankin, an avid sailboat racer, vowed that if he ever got a chance to sail in the prestigious South China Sea Race, he would get a tattoo of a dragon.

So what if he had to wait until age 67 to do it?

Rankin is a lifelong Madisonian who in January 2006 retired after more than a decade on the Supreme Court's Board of Bar Examiners. His wife, Kitty, is a well-known Madison preservationist who last month won an award for preservation advocacy from the Madison Trust for Historic Preservation. Gene's father, the late Gene C. Rankin, was a storied boxer for the University of Wisconsin, winner of three individual NCAA championships.

Gene was saying Friday that he was never very competitive himself until he discovered sailboat racing while a student at UW-Madison. But once those fires were stoked, they stayed stoked. Through school -- including UW-Madison Law School -- Rankin raced sailboats, gradually moving up in class. He finished in the top five several times in the famous Chicago to Mackinac race. In 1976, he was a finalist for the U.S. Olympic team in the International 470 class.

Then, this past March, at 67, Rankin finally got his chance to sail in the South China Sea Race, now renamed the Rolex China Sea Race. It was everything he expected and then some.

Rankin said he really hadn't done a lot of sailing in the years leading up to his retirement. But almost as soon as Rankin became a man of leisure -- in early 2006 -- he got a call from two old friends, a married couple, with whom he'd competed in the Olympic trials three decades earlier.

Rob and Andi Overton have a 50-foot Stevens sailboat. They needed help sailing it from Greece to France and wondered if Rankin might be interested. In May, he flew to Greece.

What followed was an idyllic two months, a leisurely sail with stops in Italy, Sicily and Corsica, ending in Antibes. Whenever possible, they docked and mingled with the locals. They ate squid in Palermo, and in Corleone, Sicily, they saw the monument to a district attorney and judge who had been killed due to their pursuit of organized crime.

The most memorable evening may have been at a small harbor in Italy where they had to scale a sea wall and walk nearly a mile to find a village. In the restaurant, no one spoke English.

"We managed to communicate we wanted beer and pizza," Rankin said. The pizza was cooked over a wood fire in a stone oven. It was delicious, and they washed it down wi th Moretti beer.

A year or so later, Rankin was back in Madison when another call came from the Overtons. This time they were taking the boat from the Canary Islands, off Africa, across the Atlantic to Barbados. It was a 27-day sail marred by high winds early but saved by the wonderful fresh fish caught and served daily along the way, as well as the Carnival celebration they enjoyed in Trinidad. Kitty flew down for it.

"It was spectacular," Gene said. Few clothes, much drinking and dancing. "It makes Mardi Gras seem like a Sunday School picnic."

For the past couple of years, Rankin had been posting this on the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club's Web site: "An American sailor wishes to crew on the South China Sea Race. I am a retired lawyer, age 67 and fit."

In February, he heard from a man named Jim Fernie, a Scot with whom he hit it off.

During an early conversation, Rankin said: "I hate yelling. I won't sail with people who yell."

"We don't yell," Fernie said.

Rankin flew to Hong Kong March 12 to join the crew of Fernie's 44-foot Bavaria Vision. He was dazzled by Hong Kong: "New York on steroids -- with mountains." He rode every conceivable kind of transport around the city -- trams, subways, buses, ferries, taxis, and even the world 's longest escalator.

The Rolex China Sea Race itself was arduous. Five members of the boat's eight-man crew were young enough to be Rankin's sons. He admits to feeling his age in the 96-hour race, but he held his own. The biggest trouble came later, back in Madison, when his left knee was diagnosed with a staph infection.

That's better now, and Rankin has had a chance to remember those Coast Guard sailors with the dragons sewn into their cuffs.

"I have an appointment next week with a tattoo artist," he said.