Thanks for the advice.. So, what I ended up doing was just drop my thief (sanitized) in the kettle when I had it down to around 70.
My OG was supposed to have been 1.064, but I got a reading of 1.045. How could I have been this low? It was my first all grain batch, not sure if that has anything to do with this, but I will be bummed if this really is the gravity. Any ideas?
My gravity pre boil came in at 1.049 in about 8 gallons of wort. Based on the calcs I did, the efficiency came out to 82.37, or 30.7 PPG. Do these numbers jive with my OG? Is it possible the OG reading is not correct?