[Sailormon6]

Whew! Your question is so complex, I''m only going to try to answer part of it.

It sounds to me like you are trimming your sails pretty well, up until the point when you "ease the jib a little to widen the slot." Don''t do that.

You said you don''t have a cunningham, but you can use your mainsail downhaul to put more tension on the luff of your mainsail, moving the pocket forward.

As a general rule, the mainsail causes more heeling moment than the jib. Both the main and jib are depowered by flattening them, and/or by reducing their surface area. (There are other ways, but I don''t think we need to get there yet.)

If you are trying to point as high as you can in strong wind, you need to keep the jib trimmed in flat. When you ease the jibsheet, you put a deeper pocket in the jib, which gives it a more powerful shape, and forces you to fall off the wind a few degrees. That''s the opposite of what you want to do when you''re overpowered while beating to windward.

Try tensioning the downhaul and keeping both sails flat as I suggest and see if that helps. If you are still overpowered, try reducing your sail area a bit more. There might be some tweaking you can do, but you need to get the basics right first, and I think you are getting the sail trim out of kilter when you ease the jib.