Insta crashing in some specific areas?

Weird and I've never noticed anything like this. I'm coming back after not playing for a year or two, never had any problems. For the past week, haven't had problems.

But theres this one area in Velia with a clusterfuck of fishers stacked on each other that will immediately crash my game if I get too close.

I dunno if it's related to the player count, maybe a cosmetic, but it's 100% related to the area. I crashed at least 10 times and kept trying to follow suggestions I found online, but when I tried logging in and just running away from the spot, suddenly my game is fine.

It seems like a relatively small area. I was able to sail out of Velia port, through 20 something galleys, but that clump of like 30 fishers was too much, for some reason.

FPS doesn't start to slow or anything. No error message.

Ideas on how to fix? It doesn't seem to be hard to avoid, it just gives me an uneasiness that it could happen in other random spots while I'm trying to do something important.