The Royal National Lifeboat Institution decided in March 1877 that Newton Ferrers was a good place for a station. The reasoning, recorded in the meeting minutes, was crisp: "There are plenty of fishermen to man the Life-boat, which can be readily launched in smooth water at all tides and in any wind; while she is in a good windward position for commanding Bigbury Bay in westerly and southwesterly gales, which are the most prevalent ones in this district." The Rev. Duke Yonge gave the land. A stone-built boathouse and slipway went up for £345. The Bowman cost £432 12 shillings. Bigbury Bay, the broad and treacherous water just to the east, swallowed sailing ships with grim regularity in the age before reliable engines. The Yealm fishermen would be the ones to row out for them.

The Bowman served until 1887, when a new boat called Darling arrived, funded by a legacy from Mrs Thomas of Nunney in Somerset. Darling was 34 feet long with two masts, lug sails, a jib, and ten oars. She launched five times in seventeen years but never recorded a saved life, a statistic that probably says more about who managed to call for help than about her crew. In 1904 Darling was replaced by the Michael Smart, paid for from the legacy of Mr Michael Smart of Tewkesbury. She launched nine times and saved two lives before the station closed. The pattern is typical of the small RNLI stations of that era. Most launches were inconclusive or unnecessary. The few that mattered, mattered enormously.

On the night of 28 January 1885, in a south-westerly gale, the Yealm and Plymouth lifeboats were called to the barque Wellington from Windsor, Nova Scotia. She had drifted ashore after a tragedy at sea: her captain, who according to surviving newspaper accounts had been drinking heavily and showing signs of madness on the passage from Le Havre to New York, had killed himself and two of the crew before the survivors threw the spirits overboard and called for a tow. The lifeboats spent hours running lines between her and a government tugboat until at 04:30 she was safely grounded in the Yealm estuary. The Yealm crew kept watch over the ship until late afternoon. On 8 December 1897 they rescued four men from the brigantine St Pierre, wrecked on the Mewstone, a sheer rock island off Wembury Cliffs that had a terrible reputation for catching ships in westerly weather. In April 1898 they tried to reach two of their own Yealm crabbers, Myrtle and Seabird, lost in a storm too violent to push out into. Both were lost with all hands. During the attempt, the second coxswain Harry Hockaday was nearly dragged overboard when a squall tangled his hand in the jib; a fellow crewman grabbed his leg and hauled him back.

On 20 January 1927 the RNLI committee voted to close Yealm River. Plymouth had just received a 60-foot Barnett-class motor lifeboat, twin-screw and self-propelled, capable of covering the same waters faster and more reliably than oared boats could ever manage. The Hockadays had run the station since at least the 1890s; W. Hockaday handed coxswainship to his son Henry in 1898, and Henry served thirty years until the station closed, receiving a certificate of service and a pension. Joseph Williams retired after eight years with a gratuity. The boathouse at Newton Ferrers fell silent. The last surviving crew member, Edgar Foster, died in autumn 1991, the final living link to a half-century when the Yealm's lifeboatmen pulled their oars into Bigbury Bay's gales because the alternative was to let sailors drown.