Yes, I’m feeling small and humiliated. But no, I’m not doing this in some Welsh knocking shop with Sweaty Betty from Sketty. I’m waist deep in the Irish Sea with Kirsty Jones from Carmarthen, a former world kite surfing champion, and one by one she’s drowning my preconceptions about women and surfboards.

I’ve been surfing for 15 years. I’ve ridden waves from Soup Bowl, Barbados, to Spekes Mill, Devon, and from Waimea, Hawaii, to Wurtulla, Queensland, and I’ve wiped out with the best of them. And the best of them are always blokes. The few girls I’ve seen in the line-up, have, to be offensively honest, been rubbish, and they’ve always ended up back on the beach in pools of seaweed and snot like so many washed-up whales.

So when InGear sent me to Tenby to take a lesson from Jones, I think I sniggered. To one colleague I jokingly compared the assignment to being sent to Ikea to pick up a toast rack.

I was terribly wrong.

Kite surfing, for those who’ve never seen it, involves a kite and a surfboard. The sport is the bastard offspring of a one-night stand between paragliding and windsurfing, conceived just over a decade ago by three-times world windsurfing speed champion runner-up Manu Bertin. After 15 years of holding onto a sail, this depressingly photogenic Frenchman realised something we wave-surfers had long known: that windsurfing had become too complicated.

“We have to think of another way to use the wind,” he said, “to return to a simpler engine.”

The answer was a kite: a kite as big as a bungalow, that gave watermen a three-dimensional freedom of the seas.

“How difficult can it be?” I wondered, on my way to Wales. As a proposition it seemed straightforward. Fly a kite, catch a wave, go to the pub. I mean, if a girl can do it . . .

My day with Jones started with her drawing a picture in the sand of something called a wind window. This is the zone in which the kite, a quarter sphere with the inner surface facing the wind, flies.

Take the kite around the edge of the window and it soars rather satisfyingly, responding to the slightest of tugs on either of the command lines like a well-trained sheepdog. Take the kite through the middle of the window, through the power zone, and that slavish collie becomes a slavering pack of huskies, determined to drag you up and away.

Practising on the beach with a 1.6-metre pink Flexifoil was trouble enough, and that was before Jones unfurled the proper kite — a mighty 9-metre wing with inflatable struts. “Shall we get our wetsuits on now?” she says with a smile.

Tanned and with the looks of Daryl Hannah, back in the days of Splash, Jones started windsurfing at the age of 16. She took up proper surfing a couple of years later and began kite surfing when she was 20, carving up the clear waters of Carmarthen Bay. Then she started winning competitions, taking the women’s world wave championship before beating all-comers, male and female, in the tri-discipline Red Bull Master of the Ocean contest.

Times recommends

• Win a Zeppelin flight over London
• A first timer's guide to... Morocco
• The budget guide to the French Riviera