Absorbing boundary conditions are important when one simulates the propagation of waves on a bounded numerical domain without creating artificial reflections. In this paper, we consider various hyperbolic-dispersive equations modeling water wave propagation. A typical example is the Korteweg-de Vries equation. In the case of linearized equations, some progress was recently done for one dimensional scalar dispersive equations by using discrete transparent boundary conditions. However a generalization of this approach to multi-dimensional setting is not obvious. In this paper, we consider the alternative perfectly matched layer (PML) approach for the linearized Korteweg-de Vries equation. We first propose a direct perfectly matched layer approach and study the stability of the modified system. These equations are not always stable, the main obstruction being the classical condition found in the literature on PML that the group velocity and the phase velocity need to have the same sign. Then, we introduce a hyperbolic system with a source term that is an approximation of the Korteweg-de Vries equations. In this case, the complete PML equations are not, again, completely stable. However, a version of the PML equations for this system derived without the source term is found to be stable and can absorb outgoing wave although it may creates reflections as it is not perfectly matched. Finally, we consider BBM-Boussinesq system that model bi-directional waves at the surface of an inviscid fluid layer. The dispersive properties for a subclass of physically relevant model are better suited for PML techniques since the stability condition is always satisfied. We show that the PML equations are always stable in this case. We illustrate numerically the absorbing and stability properties of these PML models and provides also KdV type simulation by chosing properly initial data.