The Bolivian navy grows the nicest fuchsia dahlias in the Lake Titicaca region.

At its hillside base, overlooking the vast sky-blue lake, Bolivia's navy also runs a guinea pig breeding program and is training recruits in greenhouse design and spinach production.

It offers classes in pig vaccination and feeding, and in salmon farming. And the eucalyptus seedlings it raises are being used to reforest eroding slopes along Titicaca's mountainous shoreline.

What does this have to do with sailing the ocean blue? Well, that's exactly the problem.

For the last 117 years, Bolivia hasn't had an ocean. And keeping more than 5,000 sailors busy without one isn't the easiest of jobs.

"By necessity we have diverse activities outside security," Capt. Francisco Pardo, the Tiquina Naval Station commander, dryly explains. "The main purpose of the navy is to support our hope of getting our sea back. But our main activity is development."

Bolivia lost its 108,000-square-mile seacoast in the 1879 War of the Pacific against Chile, a battle prompted by a dispute over taxes on bird guano exports. It is still evident today just how bitter the loss was.

La Paz, Bolivia's capital, has not one but two museums devoted to its lost seacoast. The country holds a Miss Coastline beauty pageant yearly. And many current maps show the long-lost coast as "occupied territory" that Bolivia believes it one day, somehow, will win back.

"God gives long life to our enemies so they can see our goals accomplished," reads a large painted sign overlooking the whitewashed Tiquina base.

The odds of Bolivia winning the territory back, however, remain dim. The country still has no formal relations with Chile and stacks of diplomatic treatises--"The Restitution of Our Maritime Rights: Principal Aspiration of the Bolivians," a 1951 museum tome reads--have accomplished little.

But landlocked Bolivia is not a nation to give up easily.

In 1963, it re-established its long-disbanded navy in an effort to renew its push for an outlet to the sea and to be prepared just in case it got it.

"People say, `How can you still be living with this problem that's over 100 years old?' " said Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, Bolivia's president.

"But we're not like Switzerland, which never had a seacoast and so can live without it. We keep the flame alive."

Finding a role for itself, however, hasn't always been easy for a navy that hasn't felt salt spray for generations.

In fact, Bolivia's navy--which possesses no ocean-going vessels-- consists of 40 small patrol boats, 2 hospital barges and 7 petroleum tankers.

Three or four times a year, sailors at the Tiquina base send a hospital boat around the 110-mile long Lake Titicaca to treat ailing Aymara Indians, many of whom have no other access to modern medicine.

They also team up with Peru to patrol the lake, the world's highest navigable body of water, in search of the occasional terrorist guerrilla seeking to cross into Bolivia.

The navy also has, with so much time to spare, become the main organization doing research on Lake Titicaca. With Jacques Cousteau, the Bolivians discovered in the early 1970s that blind giant pink frogs live in remote parts of the 900-foot-deep lake.

And they're been working lately on developing a better understanding of the lake's huge evaporation rate, among the highest in the world.

In Bolivia's jungle regions, in the low eastern section of the country, the navy even has a military role: Battling cocaine traffickers.

Using U.S.-supplied powerboats equipped with machine guns, sailors are patrolling the country's 7,000 miles of lowland rivers, looking for signs of cocaine processing labs.

A navy tape of the so-called "Blue Devils" at work shows camouflage-clad sailors blasting away at a deserted riverbank, then carrying out exercises aboard a rubber dinghy, looking a bit like whitewater rafters without the whitewater.

But the heart of the navy's work, especially at bases like Tiquina, continues to be as a sort of national Peace Corps.

Confronted with new conscripts who not only can't swim but often can't read, Pardo focuses on teaching them skills they can carry back to their poverty-racked rural communities once their three-month national military service is over.

"Basically, the navy is a development agency for the country on its lakes and rivers," the naval station commander said. "We want to get to the sea again. But right now we have to use what resources we have for the good of the country."

Bolivia's yearning for an outlet to the sea is based on more than just nostalgia. Without a Pacific port, the country has been subject to taxes and other restrictions put on its exports and imports by Chile and Peru.

Recently the country won free use of the Peruvian port of Ilo, but has yet to build paved roads or rail lines linking the port with La Paz.

Similarly, Bolivia has access to South America's Atlantic coast along the Paraguay and Parana rivers.

But because those rivers pass through territory controlled by Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay, free travel on them could be restricted at any time by taxes or blockades.

What Bolivia needs, Pardo said, is a coastline of its own.

"The sea is our economic link to free trade," he said. "With it our country is open to the world."