Gary Mullins springs into action as the call comes in from Ambitious, a fishing boat and regular visitor to Victoria harbour.

“I’m all for the fisherman,” he says as he turns on the advanced warning lights of the Johnson Street bridge, also known as the Blue bridge. “They work hard for a living and they deserve their money.”

Mullins adjusts the surveillance screen to monitor the traffic as he prepares to raise the bridge for the approaching boat.

Seconds before the bridge’s westbound lane starts to rise, Mullins spots him: a man with a backpack has ducked under the barricade and is dashing across.

“If it wasn’t for the public, I could do this job by remote control from home,” he says. “You have to bite your tongue.”

Opening the door to his tiny operator’s room, Mullins leans outside to monitor the man’s progress, fingers ready on the control panel.

After 14 years operating “Big Blue,” he knows the boats that pass through the channel almost as well as he knows every nook and cranny of the bridge itself.

As industry in the upper harbour wanes, requests to raise the bridge have dwindled to about three a day from about 25. It leaves Mullins with lots of time to keep a watchful eye on all that moves outside his barred windows.

He’s rescued both dogs and people who’ve slipped into the water. He’s also witnessed many suicide attempts.

Usually he just calls police, but on a couple of occasions he’s spotted someone leaning over the rails, maybe reading a letter, and crying.

“You can tell they’re in such a sad state,” he says. “I’ll ask these older ladies if they’d like to (come in) and have a seat.”

For Mullins, it isn’t just a job, it’s a passion. It’s inspired him to write prose and travel to other great bridges of the world.

But it wasn’t always that way.

“Blue ... that’s it,” Mullins says of his first impression of the historic structure.

For 21 years he enjoyed the fresh air and open space as a city parks employee. When he switched careers in 1995, it took him a year to settle into the relatively cramped and sedentary job.

“I wore a path in the carpet,” he says of his shack, almost unnoticeable along the bridge’s southern sidewalk. The room, dominated by an old sofa chair found on the street and dragged in by city crews, rattles from passing cars.

The space gets even smaller during training, he says.

Over the years, Mullins has trained 21 city employees to raise the bridge, should a request come in outside of his 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. shift.

Teaching the delicate balance between the bridge’s 350-ton opening span and its 780-ton counterweights is not as simple as pressing a button, he says. Rain and snow change the weights involved and the speed settings required.

“The bridge takes a beating (during training),” Mullins says. “I say to the bridge, ‘it will be OK, I’ll be back in a couple of weeks.’”

He suspects each two-week training session takes a year off his life.

“I let them know we’re going to go through hell and I apologize to them beforehand,” he says. There’s no room for mistakes because lives are at stake.

On graduation day, new inductees get a handshake and a rivet from the bridge -- leftovers from construction work Mullins collected years ago.

What the future holds for 57-year-old Mullins is still unknown.

Retirement, retraining or even stress leave, he muses from the sofa chair.

In April, Victoria city council decided to replace rather than renovate the aging bridge structure.

While a group of Victorians have taken up the cause to save the heritage bridge built in 1925, Mullins won’t weigh in on the political debate.

He’ll be keen to watch the construction, he says with a pause to keep back the emotions. “But I won’t watch it being demolished.”

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