"Last night I tried to slow down the yeast by ceiling the bucket and
putting
the air lock on it, but there was so much gas being produced that all
the
water from the lock was blown out of it"

Be careful with this. You can run into 2 problems:

1) If the must blows over the airlock, you can get contamination
problems.

2) If the yeast begins to choke on carbon dioxide (ie it can't release
fast enough through the airlock) and gets too stressed, you can end up
with H2S, hydrogen sulphide.