Good story,
I was on the Connie CV64. It was wider than the Enterprise, so we had some extra beam to shove through. Top speed on those girls is supposed to be classified, they admit to mid 30 knot range. I know CV65 is faster.
I posted my Enterprise story some years ago here on Free Republic,so allow me to hit the highlights one more time.
In the spring of '67 I was on board with RVAH-7,an RA5C Vigilante squadron.We were leaving Yankee Station in company with USS Bainbridge,CGN-25 heading for R&R at Subic Bay...I can still smell Olongapo if I try...but I digress.The CO of Enterprise at that time was CAPT J.L.Holloway III,later to be CNO who had deferred promotion to RADM so he could take the Big E on a combat cruise,at least that was the scuttlebutt.
Evidently there was only room for one of us pierside at Cubi Point and CAPT Holloway was determined that it would be us...let the Bainbridge anchor out.The story was that he bet the Bainbridge skipper that we could beat him to the pier.
Anyway,Bainbridge took off and was over the horizon fairly quickly.It took us a little while to get up to high speed,but we eventually passed Bainbridge like she was standing still.A couple of us wondered how fast we were going to go,we had to rig for heavy weather and all,
Now the Vigilante aircraft had the ASB-12 Bomb/Nav system which I worked on and to align the A/C stable platform we would plug in to the ship's SINS system for present position,heading and speed info.So we went up and I climbed into one of our aircraft parked aft of the island and we plugged in.
The plane had 26 tie-down chains on it,the ship was up on a plane kicking up a rooster tail that had to be 40 to 50 feet high! The vibrations got pretty bad and I was afraid that we were going to break loose from the tie downs and roll over the side so I climbed out...at which time the ship's speed readout was at 43 knots and climbing!
I don't know how much faster we got to but I would say 50 was quite possible.
BTW we got there first!