Lough Erne is not a benign body of water. It is over 150 islands strung along fifty miles of lake, with sudden squalls off the Atlantic, hidden shoals, and the kind of leisure traffic, cruisers, jet skis, weekend yachts, that turns shallow channels into accident sites. For decades, rescue work on the lough was carried out by the Royal Ulster Constabulary, with a charitable Lough Erne Rescue group filling the gaps. By the late 1990s it was obvious the model was not sustainable. The RNLI, which had been a saltwater institution since 1824, agreed to take on its first inland station as a one-year evaluation. They picked Lough Erne. On 24 May 2001, Enniskillen (Lower) Lifeboat Station became their fortieth station in Ireland, and the first anywhere on the institution's books that was not on the sea.

The initial crew were eighteen volunteers, ordinary Fermanagh residents who took unpaid leave to learn what the RNLI thought a lifeboatman needed to know. Eight went south to Cowes on the Isle of Wight for helmsman courses. The others trained at the RNLI's headquarters in Poole, in Dorset, on VHF radio, on small-engine mechanics, on the administration that keeps any volunteer operation functioning. They came back to a station that had no station. The kit, two boats, a Blenwatch class B-549 and a smaller unnamed Valiant rigid inflatable, lived behind Lough Erne Yacht Club in three portakabins. That was the operational reality for the next twenty-one years.

The portakabins kept working. In 2017 the station dropped the qualifier and became simply Enniskillen Lifeboat Station, while the upper-lough sister station was renamed Carrybridge. A Rescue Water Craft, the RNLI's term for a jet ski, lived at the station from 2009 to 2022 for fast-response work in the shallows. Crews rotated, classes were trained, the cabins aged. Finally, on a piece of land at Killadeas Road in Gublusk, a proper purpose-built boathouse rose, designed by Omagh-based Woodvale Construction and funded in part by the family of the late Alfred Russell Wallace Weir from Bangor, County Down. Solar panels cover the roof. Ground-source heating warms the floors. There is a workshop, an office, a training room, crew showers, and somewhere to dry oilskins properly for the first time in two decades. The volunteers took possession in November 2022.

The current boat is the John and Jean Lewis, an Atlantic 85-class inshore lifeboat with the hull designation B-912. She arrived in 2018. Her official naming ceremony was scheduled, then delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic, then held again until the new boathouse was finished. It was probably the longest gap between a lifeboat arriving on station and being formally christened in RNLI history. During those years of waiting for her plaque, the John and Jean Lewis was launched 97 times and brought 205 people to safety. On Saturday 1 July 2023, in a joint ceremony at the new boathouse, she finally got her name in front of the people whose names she already wore on her hull.

An inland lifeboat does not chase coastal storms. It chases summer evenings when the wind turns and the small cruiser hired in Enniskillen turns the wrong way around an unmarked rock. It chases families whose canoes flipped in a sudden squall off Devenish Island. It chases the slow tragedies of cold water, where someone goes overboard at dusk and the temperature alone is the killer. The crew at Gublusk live in the towns around the lough, and they know the names of the islands and the bays and which jetties leak and which ones do not. They train in the dark and the rain. They are exactly the kind of volunteers the RNLI was built to be made of, and they happen to do it on a freshwater lake almost as far from the sea as Ireland allows.