Having trouble getting my gravity up

I made a nut brown this weekend, and everything that could go wrong did. Stuck sparge, siphon quit working, and most troublesome, I was going for a 1.05 gravity wort, and hit 1.03 with only 3.5 gallons of wort for a 5 gallon batch! Luckily I had some DME to amp it up a bit. Anyway, I am not sure what I did wrong. Used spring water, did a protein rest at 122 for 15 ,minutes, then went up to 152 for 45 more. I was using 6lbs pale, 4 Hugh Baird, 2 biscuit, 1 Munich, .5 melanoidin. How did I screw that up?

How much did you drain from your first runnings and how much sparge water did you use? What was you grain to water ratio?

Depending on your ratio and how much you sparged you have to add in for water loss in the grain i stay around 20% works good for me.

Man, I think I solved my own problem. I tasted the beer today, tasted really wheaty? I thought, what the hell, I used 4 oz of wheat. Then I got to reading about temperatures and conversion. Tested my thermometer against another, and it consistently read about 8 degrees higher. I think what happened is that I thought my sachrification was going off at 152, and instead it was 144, perfect for wheat, not so much for the rest of my malt. Does this sound like a feasible explanation? Already bought a new therm😃