On 22 November 1995, the RNLI executive committee voted to place a lifeboat at Kildavnet on Achill Island for a one-year evaluation. The reasoning was straightforward and overdue: the nearest all-weather stations were 43 nautical miles to the north and 60 nautical miles to the south, leaving the long, exposed Mayo coastline of Clew Bay and Blacksod Bay without rapid response. A relief lifeboat called Soldian arrived to begin the evaluation. Within a few years the station was permanent, with crew facilities upgraded from temporary accommodation to a purpose-built boathouse completed in 2004 at a cost of just over six hundred thousand pounds.

On 18 September 1999, the station's first permanent all-weather lifeboat was named in a ceremony at Kildavnet: 14-28 Sam and Ada Moody (ON 1240), funded from the bequest of the late Mrs Ada Moody. The boat has been on station ever since. The same ceremony announced the award of the RNLI Silver Medal to Coxswain Brian Patten - one of the highest honours the institution gives - along with Silver Medal Service Certificates for mechanic Stephen McNulty and crew members Thomas Kilbane, John Johnston, Raymond McKenna, Liam Fallon, and Edward Corrigan. The awards were for an early rescue that defined the station's reputation in its first months of operation.

At eleven in the morning on 19 September 2013, Sam and Ada Moody launched to assist a fishing boat fifty-four miles west of Achill Island, its nets fouled in its own propellers. Conditions on arrival three hours later were described in the official log as challenging - force seven to eight winds, big seas. The crew rigged a tow and brought the disabled vessel back to harbour, arriving at seven the following morning. The lifeboat had been at sea for seventeen hours. This is the routine work of a small all-weather station: long passages, hard weather, the kind of endurance that doesn't make the news beyond the local paper.

On the evening of 23 May 2022, a lone yachtsman forty nautical miles west of Achill lost all power on his racing yacht - no communications, no ability to drop sail, no steering control. A fixed-wing aircraft located him; Sam and Ada Moody launched at half past eight and arrived on scene at eleven, with Sligo-based Rescue Helicopter 118 providing illumination. The lifeboat rigged a tow, brought the yacht to Clare Island by nine the next morning, and returned to base by ten - almost fourteen hours after setting out. The yachtsman was unharmed. The case is in some ways unremarkable, which is itself a measure of how the Achill station's first quarter-century has gone.

Look at the site from the air and the two structures read as a single statement about life on this coast: the four-storey stone tower of Carrickkildavnet on its low promontory, the modern boathouse and slipway a short walk away, and Achill Sound stretching north between Achill Island and the Corraun Peninsula. The water that O'Malley's galleys once controlled now carries Clare Island ferries, mussel boats, and the occasional yacht heading for Clew Bay. When the pager goes off in Kildavnet, the crew assembles at the boathouse and launches into a stretch of Atlantic that has not, in any meaningful sense, become less dangerous in the six centuries since the tower was built.