You could say Lek Friel is a juggler by profession.

But what he juggles are containers filled with thousands of pounds of goods that Hawaii residents rely on every day.

Friel, a Molokai High School graduate, is container operations manager for Matson Inc. and oversees the movement of most of what is shipped into Hawaii to help support our isolated island state.

"It’s kind of a juggling act," he said. "It’s a constant juggling act."

Matson handles about two-thirds of all goods shipped to Hawaii, where the population relies on ocean transportation for roughly 80 percent of all locally consumed goods, from Fritos to furniture.

Every week, three Matson containerships — each loaded with roughly 1,000 or so "cans," as Friel calls the containers — pull into Honolulu Harbor and tie up between Piers 51 and 53 at Sand Island after crossing the Pacific Ocean from ports in Seattle; Oakland, Calif.; and Long Beach, Calif.

Making sure those cans are available when customers expect them is a big part of Friel’s job.

Also important is ensuring that an equal number of cans — mostly empty ones — get loaded onto each ship leaving Hawaii so that mainland customers can fill them up again for future trips without delay.

"If a ship comes in with 1,000, you want to ship 1,000 out," Friel said, explaining that not shipping out enough empty cans will lead to a logjam that is expensive to undo. "If you have an imbalance, you will drown in empties."

It typically takes 36 hours to unload and load a ship.

Most cans are lifted off a ship by crane and placed onto a waiting trailer chassis and trucked to parking spaces for pickup by the customer at Matson’s 108-acre container yard. Other cans, typically 25 percent to 30 percent of a shipment, are transferred to one of three Matson barges that run between Honolulu and four neighbor island ports eight times a week.

Friel helps ensure that cans buried deep in the hold of a ship make it onto a barge going to Kahului, or Hilo, Kawaihae on Hawaii island, or Nawiliwili, Kauai, given that the barges typically sail 12 to 15 hours after the mother ship arrives in Honolulu.

Logistical challenges that can affect ship arrival and container delivery times include weather and mechanical problems.

The availability of stevedore labor on the mainland, which is shared between competing ocean cargo carriers and can often be tight, is another issue and was a key topic during a recent weekly conference call Friel had with container operations managers overseeing Matson’s mainland and global network.

Another concern raised during the call was how fast military equipment for the 25th Infantry Division could be unloaded from flat-rack trailers at Schofield Barracks so that more trailers could be put on a ship headed for Seattle.

Other juggling performed by Friel includes balancing goals of Matson’s sales staff that can sometimes conflict with operations staff goals.

"I’m kind of like the U.N., a neutral body that keeps the peace and gives us (Matson) the best chance for success," he said.

Friel, 50, joined Matson in 1986 as a "documentation supervisor" doing scheduling and administrative work supporting Honolulu container operations.

Before joining Matson, Friel was studying to become a teacher at the University of Hawaii at Manoa after moving to Oahu from Molokai.

Before he was hired by Matson, Friel said he wasn’t aware what went on at Sand Island.

"I didn’t know anything existed on the makai side of Nimitz Highway," he said. "Man, did my eyes open. Most people just see things on store shelves, and they don’t think about how it got there."