In 1978 the situation at the mouth of the lough got worse. The Cloughey-Portavogie lifeboat Glencoe Glasgow, which had been the de facto coverage for the wider Ards Peninsula, was withdrawn from service due to development works at Portavogie harbour. A boat capable of ten knots was already taking too long to reach an incident inside the lough. With Cloughey-Portavogie gone, Strangford was effectively uncovered. Portaferry Sailing Club and other local boatmen began a determined campaign for a station of their own. Captain A. G. Course, the RNLI's Inspector of Lifeboats for Ireland, opened a formal inquiry. A single-engined inflatable was trialled at Portaferry in 1979 and proved the case, and on 1 May 1980 a larger twin-engined D-class lifeboat (D-508) was placed on extended trials. The station was open.

In 1984 the children's television programme Blue Peter, on BBC One, ran one of its periodic fundraising appeals, this time for the RNLI. The appeal far overshot its target. Enough money came in to replace four existing lifeboats, place an extra one in the relief fleet, and put a new Atlantic 21 at Portaferry. She arrived in 1986. The naming and the formal opening of a new lifeboat house followed on 9 May 1987, the boathouse paid for through local fundraising and donations to the Mountbatten Ulster Appeal. The name Blue Peter V went on the new boat in tribute to the programme, and it has stayed at Portaferry ever since. When the Atlantic 21 was retired in 1994 it was replaced, again through a Blue Peter appeal called Pieces of Eight that raised over £1.4 million, and the new boat was named Blue Peter V (B-706). Tim Vincent handed her over at the ceremony on 17 September 1994. Twelve years later that boat had launched 328 times and rescued 355 people, and a third successor, also called Blue Peter V (B-833), arrived in 2009, named at the next ceremony by another Blue Peter presenter, Andy Akinwolere.

On the night of 10 January 2006 Blue Peter V was out on a training exercise when the call came. The fishing vessel Greenhill had sunk suddenly with three crew aboard. The conditions were cold and dark and the seas were poor. The lifeboat reached the scene and recovered one man alive. Searches for the other two continued through the following day, and only one body was found. The crew that night included Sinead Breen, on her first shout, alongside Philip Sands-Robinson and Andrew Edwards, and Helm Simon Rogers was awarded the RNLI's Thanks of the Institution Inscribed on Vellum. The station received the Walter and Elizabeth Groombridge Award for the outstanding inshore lifeboat rescue of 2006. One survivor brought home, two men lost. This is the arithmetic of inshore lifeboat work, and the Portaferry crew know it as intimately as they know the tidal flow at the Narrows.

On 5 June 2010 the village marked a double event. The arrival of the current Blue Peter V (B-833), and the formal handover of a new lifeboat house on the Strand. The boathouse cost an estimated £750,000, funded through a local appeal and through the legacy of Ms Elsie Sturgeon, a native of Liverpool who had retired to the nearby Killowen end of the lough. The building was designed in the shape of an upturned boat, clad in stone with a copper roof, intended to blend into the surrounding village. Ten commemorative plates made by the local ceramicist Donald Nelson were presented at the ceremony, with the rest auctioned for the RNLI. The slipway points directly across the Narrows to the Strangford ferry pier on the far side, the tidal race running its eternal kilometre-wide stripe between them. The station's work has not slowed. Blue Peter V (B-833) launched nineteen times and rescued seventeen people in its first year on service. The Strangford Narrows do not give the lough's edge any softer year than they ever did, and the village at the gate keeps the boat ready.