Those slam round ups can be prevented by the helmsman and mainsail trimmer's quick actions. All boats have a heel angle at which they begin to airate the rudder and stall the rudder. That heel angle is different for each boat, but that angle is usually between 35 and 45 degrees. The boat should have an inclinometer (heel angle guage). I suggest that your crew should spend some time sailing in heavy enough winds to experiment and find that angle watching the inclinometer. Your mainsail trimmer and helmsman need to completely understand that angle and keep the boat safely below that angle of heel. That's easier said than done in big shifting gusts.
In big gusts, as the gusts hit the helmsman needs to instantly move the helm towards the center and take a big bite to windward, and the mainsail trimmer needs to drop the traveller to the stops and if necessary then blow off the sheet going into vang sheeting mode, which does a collection of things, first of all, it unloads the low pressure side of the rudder and reduces the amount of air being sucked down the rudder blade and allows the rudder to bite again , it reduces heel angle and places more of the rudder to be in the water. Only as the boat flattens in those conditions can the helmsman begin to slowly and steadily load the blade again and the mainsail trimmer slowly apply more mainsail.
I may be wrong but I seem to recall that some of these boats came with cabin top mounted travellers. There's not much you can do with a cabin top traveller. The kinds of quick traveller adjustments and sheet trimming is pretty much out of the question given the high frictional loads and difficulty in getting adequate sheet tension without excessive boom bend.
On most boats it can also help to move the crew weight aft in those conditions, allowing you to use the higher stability of the stern more aggressively and pushing the rudder deeper into the water.
You should be carrying just enough sail for the steady state condition and then be prepared to shift quickly to gust survival mode. That said, people who grew up sailing masthead
rigs tend to carry way too much
jib (#1's) far longer than it is needed on a fractional
rig. You should be able to shift to your #3 at around 14-15 knots of true wind (20 plus knots apparent upwind) and be much more controlled and faster to boot. A modern #3 on a fractional can have a very wide range (8 knots to as much as 25-30 knots) and so offers great flexibility in those conditions. I have a flat and a full #3, both kevlar, and the full #3 works great in very light winds rounded up with massive backstay ease and great in heavy air, bladed out with massive amounts of backstay tension.
Racing on most fractional riggers, you almost never want to reef until the steady state winds are well up over 20 knots. The mainsails on these boats are so trimmable, that they have wildly wide wind ranges. Your question about keeping a genoa up for balance ignores the fact that the leech of a #1 genoa moves the center of effort aft relative to a number 3, even though the sail itself is at the forward end of the boat. Of course opening the leech of the genoa helps move the center of effort forward a small amount but moving the car too far aft risks powering up the head of the sail.
One minor point, I think that Alex (Giulletta) is being too hard on the Elan 37. These boats generally look like well designed IRC/IMS racer/cruisers. This is not part of Elan's goofy Impression raised salon series or their earlier IOR based series. I have always been a fan of Rob Humphrey's race boats, and the deep lead keel version looks to be one of his better designs. It may not be as sophisticated as state of the art IRC boats, but it is still a very raceable design under PHRF and probably under IRC.
Jeff
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