I got to the top of a sport pitch yesterday, clipped two draws into the chains and shouted take. Pretty standard stuff. As the rope went tight I looked Infront of me and a block about the size of a bag of sugar had come off and was being held in place luckily by the rope. I grabbed it and checked for other blocks and found an equal sized one. Got lowered off as normal with a block in each hand and continued with the day.
I've seen plenty loose rock in my time but that was scary to see it just appear like it did without any pulling. I did pull the second one off.
I was about 25-30m off the ground. Two young families below me with no helmets on made the situation feel way more serious. If it was just my mate then he could have hopefully easily dodged the rocks but with people spread out below it was not a nice feeling.
I brought the blocks down and everyone was a bit like 'wow'
I chatted to the families and they said since they almost got hit by a rock they now all 'normally' belay with a helmet and don't bring their kids to the bottom. I did point out that they didn't have helmets on and that the kids were at the bottom in a light-hearted fashion.
It's a good wake up call for me as over time it's easy to fall into the trap of how relaxing and safe sport climbing can feel compared to trad.