The Australian paddleboarder Charlie Verco secured his fourth world championship title in Hawaii with a record time, just weeks after saving a woman from Sydney during a great white shark attack.

The 25-year-old completed the demanding 52km Molokai to Oahu Paddleboard race in 4 hours, 18 minutes and 3 seconds on Sunday, beating the prior record held by fellow Australian Matt Bevilacqua from 2019 by three minutes.

Verco's record time represents the peak of his long-standing success in the competition. Still, he approached the feat with humility.

“I’m so stoked,” Verco remarked following his crossing of the sea between two Hawaiian islands.

“It’s always a challenge getting across the channel and each year it dishes up something different.”

Back in June, while training for the race, Verco's session near Coogee beach was disrupted by calls for assistance from Leah Stewart, who suffered a shark bite.

As a qualified surf life saver, Verco paddled her back to the beach while she became unconscious.

Stewart, a 34-year-old teacher and mother to a young daughter, lived through the ordeal and underwent five operations in the following days, one involving the amputation of her arm.

“The shark surfaced, I saw its dorsal fin - it was big, about 3.5 metres,” Verco shared with Guardian Australia then. “I’ve only ever seen one shark bigger than that, and that was a tiger shark in Hawaii.”

Verco said Stewart disappeared and then reappeared and he managed to help her to grab hold of part of his board as he paddled. “I had to try and keep hold of her with one hand and keep paddling towards shore with the other.”

The 27th running of the Molokai race, the world championships of paddleboarding, was more straightforward.

Verco finished almost 50 minutes ahead of second place in the “unlimited” paddleboard class of the event, which is widely considered to be the ultimate test in open-water paddling.

“Today for the first three hours I just caught the bumps I felt like catching, and if I felt like they were going under me that was OK.

“I got to three hours and the bumps started picking up again. I was like, ‘Dad, should I see what I can do?’ and Dad couldn’t hear me because he’s deaf, but George [his brother] said, ‘hell yeah let’s do it’.”

The North Bondi resident had sights on the record last year but finished more than 40 minutes outside Bevilacqua’s mark.

“Last year I got a bit ahead of myself and started chasing time because I wasn’t sure if I was going to ever come back. It just told you a lesson and showed that you’ve only got to work with what’s in front of you.

“This year my goal was just to have fun with it. It was the same attitude I had for all my training: not to be so stressed about getting all the miles and all the time in the water.”