Five minutes ago I was breakfasting on smoked salmon in the hushed splendour of my hotel dining room in Kenmare, southwest Ireland, staring vacantly at the waterfalls that virtually wrap themselves around Sheen Falls Lodge, cascading past your bedroom window so that you’re soothed to sleep by the soft rush of water. Now I am standing at the thunderous foot of these falls, kitted out in nothing worse than point-to-point gear (Barbour, jeans, wellies; no bulky waistcoats or bottom-enlarging waders), enveloped in a fine misty spray and staring vacantly into the eyes of what looks likes a large black labrador paddling around the bottom pool.

“Now, that’s the hotel seal,” says my ghillie, Brendan Grant, who will be giving me my first fishing lesson. He is also, it transpires, a recently qualified life-coach, which seems like a genius combination. He even, I am informed by one of the hotel receptionists later, took the male lead in last night’s village theatrical performance. Frankly, I couldn’t have cast a better teacher.

“Well, we’ll get up to the Bridge Pool at the top of the falls,” continues Brendan in his soft, musical Kerry accent, “And see if we can’t catch a salmon that the seal has missed.”

Like most angling tales, it is not, in fact, strictly true that this is my first fishing lesson. During eight years of fishing widowhood with my boyfriend I have been inculcated with more fishing lore and piscine legend and fishy fiction than any girlfriend should have to take. I have learnt that the simplest inquiry, such as “Catch anything?” can be answered in a hundred, even a thousand, ways, all of them meaning “No.” And I have even had a couple of casts before, except my boyfriend, mid-lesson, will suddenly spot a fish, grab the rod back from me and continue fishing himself.

In his defence, it was actually me who turned him on to the sport: while I describe myself as a fishing widow he could rightly claim to have been a “spa-widower”, since in my last job as a glossy magazine editor he was probably hauled to more luxurious new spa hotels than is quite manly. Very often, the only macho activity available was fishing. He soon caught the bug.

When we reach the Bridge Pool, Brendan takes me patiently through the simple technique of fly-casting. Although women are said to have the advantage in learning to fly-cast (“Men don’t perhaps tend to listen to instruction quite so well,” Brendan says diplomatically. “And then they may try to cast quite a long way, too quickly, with too much force.” Tchuh! — men and their rods).

I have to say that it’s not a trifling skill to pick up. Indeed, it’s a bit like trying to thread a needle with silk by wielding a hockey stick. It’s when I begin to endanger the photographer’s eyes that I call a halt. I think it would take me — an uncoordinated and not particularly sporty person — perhaps half-a-dozen lessons to master fly-casting. And the truth is I’m impatient — I might have already caught the bug — I am desperate to get my line in the water and catch a salmon. I may even have turned into my boyfriend. It may just be competitiveness, or maybe it’s something primeval, but it’s me against the salmon.

Which is odd, because on the way up the falls Brendan had elucidated for me the mysterious love-life and career-trajectory of the Atlantic salmon, so often obfuscated for me by my boyfriend’s ever-changing reasons for not having any fish in his creel. By the time the salmon make it to these waterfalls at the foot of the River Sheen, they will have swum 2,500 miles from icy Arctic waters to reach the estuary to make it to the falls. There, evading the seal, they will make the supreme effort to surmount 200 yards of surging, torrential waterfall to finally arrive by some GPS-like sense at the freshwater river of their birth, where they are snapped up by the likes of me in the first seconds of their homecoming. It could make you weep.

Except Brendan has now handed me a spinning rod, which has a metal lure at the other end of the line and is like high street compared with the couture of the fly rod, but which, following the arcane aeronautics of casting a fly, I find simple to cast with. Soon I am quartering the pool with my casts and becoming absorbed and yet aware of every movement of bird or fish or water around me, so that finally I begin to understand some of the secret of angling.

Really it’s just like meditation, an almost mindless activity that sets you at one with yourself and your surroundings. I’ve forgotten work worries and personal anxieties and am focusing on — what? My lure? The water? Birdsong? None of the above really, or all of them. And I am out in the fresh air in a place of extraordinary beauty and am even getting a bit of exercise with the casting and the reeling and the tramping to the next pool. Which is when it happens: I catch a trout.

A heavy pull on my line. Then another, so I know it’s not a snag. And then the fight, which I have to admit is not much on a powerful salmon rod, but it still gets the adrenalin pumping and I find, once I’ve got the fish — which is apparently a very good size for this river — on the bank I am genuinely elated. It’s like the feeling of leaving Selfridges with three huge bags under your arms. No, it’s better.

I’ve been bitten, by midges, as well as the angling bug, but the real evidence is that I get up at 7 o’clock the next morning with my boyfriend to see “if the rain brought up some salmon overnight”. I have little idea what this means, but I fully intend to catch a salmon before he does.