In 1964 the Royal National Lifeboat Institution made a calculated bet on the future of leisure sailing. They placed twenty-five small fast inshore lifeboats at strategic points around the British coast. The boats were inflatable, light enough to be launched by a small team in a few minutes, and ideal for the kind of incident that had begun to fill the institution's call logs as more amateur sailors took to the water. Five years later, in August 1969, Craster received its own inshore lifeboat, the unnamed D-130. The station has operated continuously since then, although the boats themselves change every few years. D-130 was replaced in 1975 by D-228, then by AB-One in 1999, then by the current boat in 2019. Each one a little newer, a little faster, designed for the same kind of inshore work that the original prototypes were built to do.

On Saturday 1 May 1982 the Craster lifeboat was called at 11:10 in the morning to a fishing boat at Newton Haven, four miles north. The crew of the fishing boat had tried to row their dinghy ashore in gale-force-seven conditions and the wind had driven them onto the rocks. An RAF Search and Rescue helicopter was scrambled as well, but Helm Neil Robson decided he could reach the men before the helicopter could winch them off. With three men aboard, he manoeuvred the inshore boat into the surf between the rocks and pulled them off, landing them in Newton Haven Bay. By 12:40, with the same crew and the same boat, he was launched again, to a different emergency: a man reported in the water at the same spot after another dinghy had capsized. They could not find him. The lifeboat beached at Newton Haven and Robson learned, with some relief, that the man had already made it to shore on his own. He and crewman Keith Williams were each presented with framed letters of thanks signed by the chairman of the RNLI.

In 1999 a new lifeboat arrived at Craster, funded by John Bagley. Bagley had raised over sixteen thousand pounds through a series of lectures and presentations about his own adventures sailing the British Steel Challenge round-the-world yacht race. At the naming ceremony, his grandson Adam Bagley, aged two and a half years, christened the boat AB-One, and became the youngest person ever to name an RNLI lifeboat. The fact reads now as a small, slightly absurd piece of charity history, the sort of thing that lifeboat stations tell new volunteers in the boathouse on a quiet evening. The boat itself served Craster for twenty years, until the present lifeboat, Skpr James Ballard RNVR DSC, arrived in 2019.

The current Craster boat, D-839, was named at a ceremony on 12 October 2019. The name commemorates Captain James Ballard of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, who held the Distinguished Service Cross for his command of an armoured trawler that captured German sailors off the north-east coast of Scotland during the First World War. The boat was funded from the legacy of Charles B. Campbell. Ballard would probably not have recognised the inflatable that now bears his name. The principle, however, has not changed: small boats, crewed by volunteers, going out from a small harbour to do what they can. Craster's herring smokehouse, which has perfumed the harbour with hot oak smoke for more than a century, sits a few yards from the lifeboat house, and the same families have often worked in both.