PUERTO VARADOR, Bolivia (AP):

The landlocked Bolivian navy finally found its own sea to sail.

A murky inland ocean created by months of catastrophic flooding in Bolivia's lowland east gave the navy's fleet of riverboats a fresh sense of purpose when their crews stepped in to rescue stranded villagers and round up livestock drowning in millions of acres of inundated cow pasture.

But as Bolivians commemorated the loss of their Pacific coast in their annual Day of the Sea yesterday, the floodwaters have finally begun to trickle away, leaving freshwater sailors stuck on their old dream of regaining the seashore Chile seized in 1879.

"Just imagine if we had a sea," said Sgt. Albaro Machaca, leaning on the railing on a riverboat parked at Puerto Varador on the swollen Mamore River in Bolivia's still-swampy eastern lowlands. "We'd have had ships where we could have really learned to sail,to really become sailors. Just imagine the ships ..."

Source of amusement

A source of international amusement but ardent native pride, the Bolivia Navy has neither a seaport nor an oceangoing vessel to call its own. Instead, the force patrols broad Lake Titicaca and Bolivia's 8,000 kilometres (5,000 miles) of navigable rivers, chasing drug smugglers and delivering fuel and supplies to remote towns.

Beyond such practical duties, the 5,000-member force also serves as a living witness to Bolivia's "mutilated soul," as Vice President Alvaro Garc?a described the wound of the lost coast during a Thursday memorial ceremony in La Paz.

Bolivia was nearly twice its present size when it gained independence from Spain in 1825, but corrupt leaders and misguided wars hacked its territory away in great chunks. Chile's capture of the coast came during the War of the Pacific, fought over valuable saltpeter and guano deposits in the coastal deserts.