Arthur Hill ducked under the upturned hull again and again. Each dive was a guess: would the air still be there, would the girl still be conscious, would Hill himself surface. After several attempts he found her and got her out, into the waiting lifeboat. She lived. The RNLI awarded Hill its Silver Medal, one of the highest honours in the service, and the Maud Smith Award for 1983, given annually for the bravest rescue performed by lifeboat crew during the previous year. Helmsman John Strachan received the Thanks of the Institution inscribed on Vellum. The motor-boat survivors went home. The Largs crew went back to the station and waited for the next call.

Through the winter of 1963, the RNLI ran trials of a new kind of rescue craft. Britain's seaside resorts were filling with sailors and waterskiers and pleasure craft, and the existing fleet of full-sized lifeboats took time to launch. Something faster was needed, smaller, that a handful of volunteers could push down a beach in minutes. Twenty-five inshore stations were planned around the UK. In Scotland, just two sites were chosen, and Largs was one of them. In May 1964 the station opened with an unnamed 16-foot inshore lifeboat designated D-22. Early on these inshore boats were seasonal, brought in for the spring and put away in the autumn. The stations did not always get the same boat back the next year.

An early rescue came when six men aboard a drilling pontoon off Hunterston were in trouble. The pontoon was moving violently in heavy seas; the lifeboat took all six off and got them with their service launch back to Hunterston Jetty. Helm John H. Harrison, Robert Watson, and John Mackie each received a Framed Letter of Thanks signed by the Chairman of the Institution. By 1997 the station had a larger boat than the 1981 boathouse could accommodate alongside its Talus MB-764 amphibious launching tractor. A new boathouse was built with workshop, storage, and crew facilities, completed in February 1998. Princess Anne opened it formally in July 1998. The current lifeboat, R. A. Wilson (B-854), entered service on 6 November 2011, funded by Robert Amory Wilson. The Atlantic-class inshore lifeboat carries the kind of speed and stability that the 1964 D-class only hinted at.

The station sits at the junction of Greenock Road and Barfields in Largs, looking west over the Firth of Clyde toward Great Cumbrae. From its launching ramp the boat can reach Cumbrae's shores in minutes and the open water beyond it in not much longer. The Firth is a working sea: ferries running to Cumbrae and Bute, dinghies racing in summer regattas, yachts threading the channels between islands, the Waverley paddle steamer making its summer calls. Most of the people who use these waters never need the lifeboat. The crews train, maintain the boat, and stand ready for the small percentage who do. The 1983 rescue made Largs famous in the lifeboat world, but it is the daily readiness, six decades and counting, that defines the station's actual work.