Never believe a thing a pilot tells you.
Arrived the previous day at Le Touquet with a vacuum pump failure and decided it was unsafe to fly home on partial panel due to the weather.
The following day the weather was similar so we decided to leave it for a bit. TAFs looked “iffy” but some pilots were departing for the UK. I decided to go up to the Tower and see if they were going IFR but all seemed to be on VFR flight plans.
One was calling mid channel so I asked the controller to ask the guys altitude and weather conditions. The answer came back VFR 2000ft.
We departed about 30 minutes later to find that the weather was actually not bad near Le Touquet. However the nearer we got to mid channel the worse it got. Bearing in mind our friends weather “report” we carried on hoping for the promised 2000 ft. It never came. We ended up scud running into pouring rain at 400 ft towards high ground at Dover.
Bearing in mind we had no form of reliable instruments we headed towards Lydd and got a series of QDMs to arrive there with insufficient height for even a circuit. It was still pouring down.Fortunately it was a straight in.
Lydd then told us if we had arrived 20 minutes earlier we would not have got in.
So thanks for the information from mid channel (whoever you were) presumably flying home IFR on a VFR flight plan...for whatever reason.