Ynys Llanddwyn was already populated when the first lifeboat arrived. A row of stone cottages on the island housed the pilots who guided merchant ships up the Menai Strait toward Caernarfon. The Caernarfon Harbour Trust placed a boat there in 1826, betting that the pilots could double as rescue crew when ships hit trouble in Caernarfon Bay. The arithmetic never quite worked. There were usually too few pilots on the island at any one moment to launch a boat that needed at least six oars. A handful of rescues may have been attempted; records are spotty. By 1835 or 1836 the boat had been pulled back to Caernarfon, where the crew problem was less acute. The lesson - that geography and rescue work do not always cooperate - would have to be relearned.

In 1840 the Anglesey Association for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck tried again. They bought a 26-foot lifeboat from Taylor of Limehouse for £65, built a 32-foot boathouse on the island, and enrolled four extra men from Newborough village to thicken the crew. This time it stuck. The Heywood rescue six years later proved the model. So did a much grimmer night the following year. On 16 September 1847, the lifeboat was launched in heavy seas to help the Soane of Boston; she capsized and was washed ashore, drowning crew member William Owen. The other men righted her, set out again, and brought every member of the Soane's crew home. In 1855 the RNLI took over management of the station. In 1861 they built a new boathouse for £130 and stationed a 30-foot self-righting boat - the first generation of a design that could roll over in a wave and pop back upright. In five years that boat saved twenty-nine lives.

In 1866 the station received a new boat with a story. John Gray Bell had been a bookseller in Manchester and an honorary secretary of the RNLI's Manchester branch. When he died, donations in his memory funded a Llanddwyn lifeboat that took his name. After the boat was completed in Caernarfon, she was draped in flags and paraded through the town to the harbour, then launched and rowed across the Menai Strait to her station. The carriage that would haul her up and down the beach was ferried to the island free of charge on the steamer. The John Gray Bell served until 1885, when she was replaced by the Richard Henry Gould (ON 66) - a 34-foot, ten-oared self-righting boat from Forrestt of Limehouse, built for £327. She was the last lifeboat Llanddwyn would ever hold.

Twenty-two years of service brought the Richard Henry Gould only ten launches and just two lives saved. The shipping had changed. Steam was replacing sail, and ships in trouble were now further out or differently in trouble than they had been in the 1840s. The crew problem returned in its old form. Newborough's young men were drifting away from the village, and getting anyone reliably to the island - across mud flats and tide - in time to launch was becoming impossible. In 1907 the RNLI made the same decision the Caernarfon Harbour Trust had made seventy-one years earlier: Llanddwyn was simply too remote. The station was formally closed. The pilots' cottages still stand on the island. The boathouse ruin is still visible, looking out across the bay toward water that has not been any less dangerous since.