Courtmacsherry's first lifeboat arrived in December 1825, just a year after the founding of the Royal National Institution for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck. Captain James D'Ombrain, Inspector General of the Irish Coastguard, had recommended three Irish stations - Arklow, Wicklow, and Courtmacsherry - and a 26-foot boat was ordered from William Plenty of Newbury, Berkshire. There was, however, no boathouse. The lifeboat sat exposed to weather and salt. By 1840 it was unfit for service, and no records survive of any rescue it actually performed. The station then went silent for almost three decades. The RNIPLS became the RNLI in 1854, but it was not until 1867 that Courtmacsherry was properly re-established. This time there was a boathouse, a 32-foot self-righting lifeboat called the City of Dublin, and a crew that knew what they were for.

In 1901 the station received a 37-foot, twelve-oared self-righting lifeboat built by the Thames Ironworks, paid for by the estate of an architect and wine merchant named Alfred Gwilt, and christened for his wife Kezia. She would become the most famous boat the station ever pulled. On New Year's Day 1904, the French barque Faulconnier struck the rocks at the Seven Heads while sailing from San Francisco to Queenstown. A small local yawl reached her first, brought fifteen of the twenty-six crew ashore, then capsized on the return trip - all aboard somehow made it to land. The Kezia Gwilt rowed out in heavy seas to recover the remaining eleven men. Eleven years later she would row toward the Lusitania, and the name Kezia Gwilt would be inscribed permanently into Irish maritime memory.

Ireland was neutral during the Second World War, but the war found Courtmacsherry anyway. The motor lifeboat Sarah Ward and William David Crossweller, the station's first powered boat, was called out repeatedly to pick up the crews of vessels torpedoed or bombed off the southern coast. Sailors of many nationalities owed their lives to a small Irish harbour. On 13 March 1945, in one of the strangest turns of that war, the lifeboat was called to rescue the crew of German submarine U-260, which had been damaged by a mine and scuttled by its own men. The submariners were brought safely ashore and interned for the remainder of the war. A boat designed to save lives saved them without ever asking whose.

On the night of 24 October 1998, in winds gusting between 50 and 70 knots, the yacht Supertaff was demasted and capsized. A helicopter found her but could not lift the crew off in the conditions. The Courtmacsherry lifeboat Frederick Storey Cockburn launched at 7:55 p.m. and reached the scene an hour and ten minutes later, only to find that going alongside was impossible - the seas were too high and the deck was a snarl of broken mast and rigging. A line was passed, tied to a liferaft. The three crew climbed in, cut themselves free, and were hauled across to the lifeboat at 10:00 p.m. They were ashore at Courtmacsherry by 11:26. Second Coxswain Daniel O'Dwyer received the RNLI Bronze Medal for that night. In 2023, after twenty-eight years of service, the Frederick Storey Cockburn was retired. Her replacement, a 2.6 million-euro Shannon-class boat called Val Adnams, was named by - and after - a donor from Idaho. The station that began with one unsheltered boat in 1825 now holds two centuries of names, awards, and rescues, and one long memory of the day they rowed toward the Lusitania too late.