A motorboat trip from Astrakhan along the Volga, Bakhtemir, Volga-Caspian Canal, Caspian Sea to Makhachkala. The boat crossing along the Caspian Sea began with the registration of permits for going out to sea and the border zone. On the FSB website I found the phone number of the border department for the Astrakhan region and the Republic of Kalmykia, called 8 (8512) 55-98-22, asked: "How should I notify them about the water crossing by boat from Astrakhan to Makhachkala?" They responded by writing an official letter to the email address [email protected], in any form with a detailed description: the route and timing of the crossing, the floating craft, rescue equipment, navigation, communication, information about the ship owner, navigator, crew. I wrote a letter to the Astrakhan border. management and to the address of the border department of the FSB of the Russian Federation for the Republic of Dagestan. The next day, an officer from the Astrakhan border department called back, found out what class of AIS we had and explained that we could only go during the day. A few days before that, I met interesting people - a Swiss Daniel Louis Meili is traveling on a ten-meter RIB-e boat around Europe. The blog about his trip is www.circumnavigate.blog. There is a version in Russian on his website. Having started moving along Russian territorial waters in Murmansk, he passed the Barents and White Seas, the White Sea-Baltic Canal, Onega, the Volga-Baltic Canal, the Volga, and the Volga-Don Canal. While crossing the Taganrog Bay, his companion - a resident of Krasnoyarsk Elena, broke her arm and they were forced to go to Yeysk. That's where we met. It is significant that Daniel had never owned a boat before, had never made any boat crossings, and he is making such a difficult autonomous journey for the first time at the age of sixty. His crossing of Russia was covered by our colleague blogger Oleg Senov. Link to Daniel's motorboat crossing on his RIB from Murmansk to Arkhangelsk filmed by Oleg Senov • Around Northern Europe on a RIB. Travel... I strongly recommend that fans of extreme motorboat travel watch it. In our trip, the weather forecast, or rather the wind and wave height forecast from the WindFinder application gave a time corridor for only two days from July 4 to July 5, 2023, on the other days there was a strong wind and, accordingly, raised large waves in the Caspian Sea. Therefore, we had to shorten our motorboat trip to two days, on July 4 from Astrakhan to Makhachkala, on the fifth back from Makhachkala to Astrakhan. Otherwise, we would have to wait for a change of scenery for an indefinitely long time. On July 2, we returned by car from Yeysk to the Astrakhan yacht club "Yacht Shipyard". We prepared the boat for the crossing, filled the tank with gasoline, poured an additional two hundred liters of gasoline into canisters, loaded water and provisions. On the morning of July 3, we left the Zolotoy Zaton Bay by boat for the Volga and headed south to the western part of the Volga River delta - the Bakhtemir River. The intermediate point of our boat trip was the settlement of Vyshka. There we were supposed to spend the night at the Kovcheg recreation center and refuel. But to get to Vyshka, we had to pass a shallow shoal. Since the water in the Volga and Bakhtemir had dropped significantly, a shallow obstacle appeared on our way - a shoal (bay) fifty to sixty centimeters deep. We passed the Volga by boat. The Old Volga River went left towards Nikolskoye, we turned right into the Bakhtemir River. We passed the zero kilometer of the Volga-Caspian Canal. Having reached the eighth vein along Bakhtemir, we turned into the shallows towards the village of Vyshka. We called a gamekeeper from Vyshka to show us the way along the water, through the shallows. The gamekeeper said that we had to go through the shallows on a plane. We passed the entire vein on a plane, passed almost the entire shallows, but before entering the canal of the village of Vyshka we ran aground with our engines. In the village of Vyshka we went to one of the main attractions of the Astrakhan region - the beautiful Vyshka lighthouse, built in the 1850s. In the nineteenth century, it stood on the shore of the Caspian Sea, but in the twentieth century, when the waters of the Caspian, due to shallowing, went thirty kilometers, the lighthouse remained standing in the middle of the steppe. At the request of the State Inspectorate for Small Vessels, we registered our passage across the Caspian Sea as a tourist group on the Emergencies Ministry website. In the morning, we refueled the boat at a gas station. We tried to pass the shallows ourselves, in displacement mode. We immediately ran aground. A ranger came to the rescue in a boat and took us in tow. We passed the entire shallows in tow. We called the Ikryanoe border outpost and took the departure number at sea. It is very important for further border guard