Steve Sorg has been welding since he was 10 years old, helping his father on the family dairy farm in Prosser, Wash.
“Yeah, I know all about cows. The best milk comes from dipping a five-gallon bucket into the huge milk tank on a dairy. You let it set for about an hour and there gets to be about an inch of cream on it. Scrape that off. When you’re a kid, you put that on your Cheerios. That’s how we grew up down there. Farm-fed.”
He was hired on at a steel shop out of high school, repairing big farm equipment, train cars…anything that came his way. But the work slowed to a trickle.
“I’ve always liked steel. Always. But I had to get more hustle-and-bustle. There just wasn’t enough work down there. I moved to the big city for work.”
Steve Sorg moved to Seattle in 1985, joining Foss almost 10 years later when his son, Seth, was five years old. Twenty years later, he spends his days orchestrating the rebuild and repair of tugs, barges and fishing boats in the shipyard Steel Shop.
“Welding, fitting, burning, beating – we do everything,” he said, laughing.
And while Seth is sure he “wouldn’t have made it” growing up in Prosser, he never imagined joining his father in a career that has spanned most of his lifetime.
“It never really crossed my mind,” said Seth. “When I grew up, I wanted to be a pilot. I’ve always wanted to fly, that’s always been the dream. But you need money to fly.”
So Seth joined his father in the Steel Shop, but he didn’t stay there.
“It is a dangerous place,” Steve said. “He wanted to fly – and he had already been going to school for it – but it is expensive, and he had more needs than just his school money. So, he worked a couple of other jobs, not too high a pay, and we were needing help so I said, hey, he can come down and start on the bottom. It only took him three years to make journeyman.”
Seth now works as a rigger.
“It’s pretty much you move whatever’s not able to be moved by manpower,” he explained. “To use a piece of machinery, or a piece of some type of equipment, or any other tool that we have. Leverage is our friend. I like rigging. It’s pretty fun. You do crazy stuff every day. There’s always an adventure, there’s always something different.”
Steve and Seth drive 80 miles every day from their home in Bonney Lake. Steve said a potential move of work to Everett has him contemplating retirement, but for now he’s concentrating on the work and Foss’ motto: “Always Safe. Always Ready.”
“We’re pushing. We want to get things done. There’s a lot of things on my mind that I have to worry about each day. I have people going into spaces where I went first, checked out. It’s quite a deal. It can really weigh your mind down if you let it. But it’s been pretty exciting around here. We just finished a new fireboat for the city of Long Beach, California. That’s the first boat we’ve built in the 20 years I’ve been here.”
