Arequipa region holds the largest extension of the Peruvian littoral at the Pacific sea, has also fresh water resources composed of rivers and lagoons from the coast to the Andes highland. The ALBA vehicle is a low-cost autonomous surface vessel with open source architecture that is being developed to support water monitoring tasks in the region. This article deals with the nonlinear identification problem for an autonomous surface craft and the maximum likelihood estimation approach is used to estimate its parameters. The parametric nonlinear model is considered with simulated and experimental data. The results shows good fitting values when two, three and a maximum four parameters are estimated.