The RNLI's inshore lifeboat programme began in 1964. The service had spent more than a century building bigger, slower, all-weather boats for the long deepwater rescues - the lifeboats of legend, with their oilskinned crews and gold medals. But by the post-war years, the rescue work was changing. Holiday weekends brought sailors, surfers, paddlers, dinghy crews, all needing help in the half-hour window between trouble and tragedy that the heavy boats simply could not close. So the institution distributed twenty-five small, fast inflatable inshore lifeboats around the British coast, manned by three or four people, launched from a beach trailer in a few minutes. Trearddur Bay - a long shallow bay on the west coast of Holy Island, with its surfers, holiday-makers and famously treacherous tide-races around Cod Rocks - was an obvious candidate. The station opened in May 1967. The first rescue came on 4 June. The boathouse was built in 1971.

Today the station operates two inflatable lifeboats. The bigger Atlantic 85, Hereford Endeavour (B-847), has been on station since 2010 - rigid-hulled, twin-engined, capable of 35 knots, designed to work in conditions and at distances the smaller boat cannot. The smaller D-class, Clive and Imelda Rawlings II (D-885), arrived in 2024; it is a single-engined inflatable for inshore work in calmer conditions and tight spots. A new boathouse went up in 1993 with crew room, workshop, fuel store and a small souvenir shop run by volunteers - the kind of building that doubles as the social centre of the local lifeboat community. The crew are volunteers in the old sense: plumbers, teachers, hoteliers, retired soldiers, people who drop what they are doing and run for the boat when the pager goes off, no matter the weather or the hour.

The Cod Rocks have a long entry in the station's casualty log. In 1971, John Burns and Edmund Williams won RNLI Bronze Medals for rescuing two people clinging to a capsized dinghy on those same rocks. In 2001, Christopher Pritchard was honoured for pulling three people off a capsized speedboat. In 2006, Terry Pendlebury was commended for helping save two divers. And in May 2022, in a ceremony at the Royal Festival Hall, Lee Duncan accepted the Silver Medal for the May 2021 surfer rescue while his three crewmates - Dafydd Griffiths, Leigh McCann and Michael Doran - received Bronze Medals. The citation describes Duncan bringing the lifeboat in close enough to the rocks to lift the casualty out of the water while keeping the boat from being smashed by the same surf that was drowning her. The Atlantic 85 had been in service for sixteen years; this was the first time a crew aboard one had been judged to have performed at the highest standard the RNLI recognises. The surfer survived. So did the crew. The boat went back out the next time the pager sounded.