Hillary had given the Isle of Man, and the wider lifeboat movement, much of his fortune and most of his life. When he died in 1847 the RNIPLS lost its prime mover. Funds dried up. By the 1840s the original Ramsey lifeboat was already in disrepair, and after Hillary's death the station effectively ceased to function. For two decades there was no lifeboat at Ramsey. In 1854 the moribund RNIPLS was rebuilt and renamed the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. In 1868 the Lieutenant Governor of the Isle of Man wrote to the new RNLI and asked for the Ramsey station to be re-established. The Institution agreed. A 33-foot, ten-oared self-righting lifeboat was ordered from Forrestt of Limehouse, funded by Mr James Ryder of Manchester. She was delivered in November 1868. Y. Gallow built a boathouse on the Esplanade for one hundred and forty-five pounds. At her naming ceremony on 28 September 1869, Miss Christian of Milltown gave her the name Two Sisters, after Mr Ryder's daughters.

She was launched 42 times. She saved 117 lives. On 7 November 1890, in rough seas, the Two Sisters reached the steam dredger Walter Bibby and rescued all fifteen men aboard. Four days later, in similarly poor weather, she was launched again - this time to the vessel Margaret, on passage from Runcorn to Belfast. Her three-man crew were brought safely ashore. For these two services Edward Christian Kerr, the station's Honorary Secretary, and Robert Garett, her Coxswain, were each awarded the RNLI Silver Medal. Forty-one years later, on the night of 20 November 1941, with the war on and blackouts in force, the Aberdeen steam trawler Strathairlie ran aground at Skellig Bay just north of Ramsey. The lifeboat Lady Harrison could not get close enough to take the men off directly. So Coxswain John Comish and his crew rigged a cable across to the trawler and brought fifteen men ashore one by one in the dark. He received the RNLI Bronze Medal.

Some lifeboat stations carry the name of one family the way an old church carries a memorial window. Ramsey is one of them. Ann Ritchie, born Gough, was President of the Ramsey Ladies Lifeboat Guild and the widow of James Ritchie. Together and individually they funded boat after boat - six of them, by the time the most recent one was named. When Ann Ritchie died in 1990, the residue of her estate became the Gough Ritchie Charitable Trust; one third of the trust's income still goes to the RNLI for use in the Isle of Man. In 1991 a new boat arrived at Ramsey, the Ann and James Ritchie. The old Norbury Boathouse, which had stood for ninety-six years, was demolished to make room for the New Norbury Boathouse - bigger, with crew facilities and a souvenir shop. In 2022, after thirty-one years of service, the Ann and James Ritchie was replaced by the Shannon-class 13-42 Ann and James Ritchie II - the sixth boat funded by the family, and the boat that still launches today.

Behind the medals and the boats are the people. The RNLI is, and always has been, volunteer. The crews of Ramsey have been awarded Members of the Order of the British Empire and British Empire Medals across the decades - William Reginald Edwards in 1966, William Frank Cottier in 1971, James Harold Kneale in 1987, James Kinnin in 1997, Kevin Andrew Christian in 2012, Stewart Mark Kenyon in 2020. Most of those names will not mean much outside a small Manx town. Inside that town they mean everything. To put a lifeboat in the water at three in the morning, in a blow, because somebody else is in trouble in the bay - that is a small civic miracle that has been routine in Ramsey since the year before Andrew Jackson became President of the United States. They are still doing it.